Slovakia will in no way support the UN Global Compact for Migration. Those are the words of the Slovak Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini after an extraordinary EU summit in Brussels on Sunday. Pellegrini also stated that if Slovakia's participation in the negotiations on the compact in Marrakech next month at any level - ministerial or other - meant automatically joining, nobody would attend the negotiations on behalf of Slovakia. The Slovak PM said that he would ask the Foreign minister Miroslav Lajčák along with the Foreign Ministry's Secretary Lukáš Parízek for an analysis on Slovakia's participation or non-participation in Marrakech. Pellegrini also believes that the Slovak Government will not lose Foreign Minister Lajčák, who has threatened to resign over the matter. Representatives of the junior coalition Slovak National Party (SNS) are campaigning loudly against the international compact.
"I have my own draft resolution on the UN Global Compact for Migration and consider it to be better than the one prepared by the SNS, in which the Party is demanding the Government to disagree with the compact", Foreign Affairs Minister Miroslav Lajčák said on the public broadcaster RTVS's discussion programme on Saturday. Lajčák is convinced that Slovakia should go to the Marrakech conference on migration in December. He also said that this is not about him or migration, but that a precedent is being created that Parliament will ban the Slovak diplomacy from doing its job.
The Opposition Freedom and Solidarity party does not agree with the compact. However, its MP Martin Klus feels sorry for Lajčák to a certain degree. "We have a Smer-SD nominee and his own party is sticking the knife in," he said, adding that the SNS was doing bad things and that the current coalition had been harmful to Slovak foreign policy in the long term. Klus does not agree that the compact does not support migration. According to him, there is a moral obligation. "Why actually join something which isn't binding," he said, pointing to several countries that have refused the compact.
The leader of the Slovak National Party and Parliamentary Speaker, Andrej Danko, is asking Miroslav Lajčák for a political compromise. Either a compromise is found in the case of Marrakech, or the Government, on its own responsibility, will send the Foreign Minister to the talks, with the prime minister also being responsible for this if it happens. However, Danko does not consider leaving the Government if Slovakia participates in the Marrakech negotiations. According to him, there will be general elections soon [due in 2020, ed. note] and the public will decide.
