A party headed by pro-Kremlin leader has emerged as the winner in an election in Slovakia with votes more than expected. This will likely pose a challenge to NATO and EU unity on Ukraine.<\/p>\n
As per the preliminary results released by Slovakia\u2019s Statistical Office at 6 am local time, Robert Fico\u2019s populist SMER party won 23.3% of the vote. Meanwhile, Progressive Slovakia (PS), a liberal and pro-Ukraine party bagged 17% votes.<\/p>\n
Fico, a two-time former prime minister, now has a chance to regain his job but he must first form a coalition with another party as his party has not won with a major margin. Led by a former SMER member, the moderate-left party Hlas, which was formed due to the internal disputes of SMER, came third with 15% of the vote, and could play kingmaker.<\/p>\n
With seven political parties reaching the 5% threshold, which is required to enter the parliament, the coalition might be long and messy.<\/p>\n
The leader of Hlas, Peter Pellegrini said that his party was \u201cvery pleased\u201d with the election results. \u201cThe results so far show that Hlas will be a party without which it will be impossible to form any kind of \u2026 coalition government.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A party headed by pro-Kremlin leader has emerged as the winner in an election in Slovakia with votes more than\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":4712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[290,1276],"class_list":["post-4711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-russia","tag-slovakia-elections"],"reading_time":"1 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}