A new beginning

Yesterday, Fico returned to the president's palace not accomplishing the task bestowed to him to form a majority government. Not only have all opposition parties during election time declared not wanting to co-operate with Fico, after the election results they immediately started talks on the formation of a new government. And while comrade Fico fiddled and fretted around, pretending he would be able to negotiate some deals with parties, it was only a ridiculous stretching of time, leading nowhere. Despite sulking and repeating his mantra, that his party was by far the winner, Fico has done such a great job antagonising himself completely, that nobody wanted to play with him.  That's the political reality.

Yesterday evening, a list of programme points of the future government was published, and reading it was like a dose of fresh oxygen. The highest priorities are aimed at the Justice system, a thorough fight against corruption and more. Indeed steps, that are urgently needed.

Whether these intentions are indeed realistic is perhaps another question; To cleanse the Justice system will be almost an impossible task - where Fico has willingly allowed Mečiar's HZDS members to get strategic key positions within the judiciary, obviously in order to keep the corrupted politicians out of the courtroom. This willing obstruction of justice will be very difficult to mend. Not only will it highly depend on the moral conduct of every individual judge - where most of them are succumbing for various reasons to the pressure of the highly controversial godfather Harabin. In order to detach him from his influence, a constitutional majority needs to be reached in parliament. Fico's interest, to cover up his past deeds is probably too big to expect a co-operation of his party. 

Despite the long and difficult road ahead, the speed of reaching the reached consensus against the evils of the past is impressive. Arguably, it is exactly this evil, which at this moment is a binding force between the four parties. The willingness to address exactly these points is to be applauded, and it gives me some real hope on the professional approach of this coalition, despite certain Vatican hiccups a few days ago. 

After 20 years of abuse of power from many sides, but let's be fair; also the public has generally given its consent to this behaviour for a long time, perhaps now Slovakia will start moving a bit forward. The measures announced are almost revolutionary even on a European scale. At this point, they have my support. 

MS