I’m rather proud of the graph I did in 2006 that traced the trendline of HZDS representation in parliament and extended it to 2010…where it crossed the X-axis precisely around June.  I can’t exactly do the same thing this year since extrapolating it t0 2014 out puts HZDS at negative fifteen seats.  But as I [...]

I have lived my entire professional life with HZDS, frequently visiting its offices, often taking it to task for what I regarded as serious accountability violations.  And with this set of results for the SUSR, I think it is gone.  (I think it is the first time HZDS has ever fallen below 5% in any [...]

More from wide-ranging Tim Haughton, who this time sacrificed dry feet to bring a full report of Tuesday’s political campaigning in Slovakia and showed his political acumen and intrepidity by going not to Bratislava, where everybody goes, but rather to Kosice. How to Win Votes and Influence People – Some Reflections from Slovakia Tim Haughton, [...]

With 8 parties potentially entering Slovakia’s parliament there are 255 different coalition possibilities.  Fortunately, not withstanding Bismark’s aphorism that “Politics is the art of the possible,” there are quite a few coalition possibilities that we can exclude and in the end we can narrow down the possibilities to a relatively small number.  In the paragraphs [...]

How well do public opinion polls in Slovakia predict election outcomes?  Well as the previous post suggests, not too well.  But they’re all we’ve got.  Of course we could always wait until the future comes to us, but, frankly, where’s the fun in that.  So rather than sit around and wait or make faulty predictions, [...]

The pattern looks familiar and the lines haven’t changed much, but there are a few ways that this month’s results by FOCUS change our understanding of the current political competition. I have actually been fearing this change for a long time–not because of the actual politics involved but because of the emergence of a new [...]

 [Citajte post aj po slovensky] “Less than perfect” could be the title of nearly post on polling coverage in Slovakia (hence, in many ways, this blog), and I shouldn’t be too critical but today both major papers went out of their way to mangle polling data. In SME: “New party Most already clearly drawing Csaky [...]

Except, perhaps, victory. Today brings more news from the ever-shrinking HZDS: last week it was Sergei Kozlik with criticism; this week it’s Zdenka Kramplova (see below).  The cost of criticism is lower now that HZDS has several times breached the threshold of electability: why refrain from criticizing a party that won’t get elected anyway.  Kozlik [...]

A few initial thoughts (perhaps my only thoughts) on Slovakia’s Europarliament Elections. In general there are few surprises here:  Smer wins, SDKU follows at at a great distance, along with SMK and KDH.  Perhaps the only superficial surprise is the apparent reversal of numbers for SNS and HZDS, but even this is not particularly surprising [...]