President on lack of EU top post for Central Europe

The Central European region has no representative in the top positions of the European Union institutions because these countries blocked other candidates during the negotiations in the European Council at the turn of June and July. Slovak President Zuzana Caputova stated this at the end of her two-day official visit to France on Thursday. She responded in this way to criticism from Slovak National Party (SNS) Vice-chair Anton Hrnko saying that his party had expected Caputova at her meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday to express disagreement that "the geographical principle wasn't taken into account when the allocation of posts was being determined, with the most powerful countries dividing them up among themselves". "Blocking other candidates probably doesn't help us have our representative in top positions," she noted. The Visegrad Four (V4) countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) together with Italy rejected the candidacy of Socialist election leader Frans Timmermans as European Commission President.