Parliament voted to oust Environment Minister Tomas Taraba (a Slovak National Party/SNS nominee) with 77 votes on Tuesday evening, with all 77 MPs present in the chamber voting in favour of his dismissal and 73 MPs absent. The opposition made up 70 votes, with coalition member SNS adding the 7 votes needed to create the majority.
Parliament debated the no-confidence motion against Taraba for just over an hour. Apart from opposition Progressive Slovakia (PS) MP Tamara Stohlova who submitted the motion, only Taraba and SNS leader Andrej Danko took part in the debate.
President Peter Pellegrini will officially dismiss Taraba from office on Wednesday (30 September).
Parliamentary vice-chair and leader of the junior coalition SNS party Andrej Danko rejected allegations that he cooperated with the opposition over the removal of Taraba, underlining that he does not want to disrupt cooperation within the coalition. But he emphasized in Parliament that his party, who nominated Taraba to the post does not want him as environment minister anymore.
He reiterated that he has agreed to change the agenda of the parliamentary session because he has exhausted all other options. Danko repeated that he had given Taraba plenty of time and had also asked Prime Minister Robert Fico (Smer-SD) to replace him. "This is not something that should disrupt coalition cooperation," Danko told Smer-SD MPs. "It's uncomfortable for me that we have to speak out in this way," he said.
Earlier on Tuesday, the opposition along with almost all MPs of the SNS caucus succeeded in bringing the motion forward on the agenda, with SNS also agreeing to this procedure as, according to Danko, the party had exhausted all options.
SNS did not agree with Prime Minister Robert Fico withdrawing the proposal for Taraba's dismissal. Fico justified it by stating that "developments triggered by SNS's request and the subsequent stances taken up by its representatives pose a serious risk to maintaining the parliamentary majority and the proper functioning of the government".
On Wednesday Smer-SD party will convene a party leadership meeting to decide the next course of action following Tarba’s ouster from the post of deputy prime minister and environment minister. According to PM and chairman of Smer, Robert Fico SNS party has forced him to take this approach.
Coalition member Hlas-SD declared that part of the governing coalition took a dangerous path today by handing real power to the opposition.
The opposition — increasingly aggressive and unprepared to govern, in Hlas-SD's view — is the only real winner of Tuesday's developments in Parliament.
"Hlas once again stresses that the only way to settle relations within the governing coalition is to immediately seek a solution at the negotiating table. Only in this way can enough room be created for the government to devote the remainder of its term to working for the people rather than internal disputes over ministerial posts," the party added.
An early election is the only recourse in the situation that has arisen, Progressive Slovakia (PS) leader Michal Šimečka declared in response to Taraba’s dismissal.
Šimečka added that PS will put pressure on the government to hold an early election as soon as possible, and called on Prime Minister Robert Fico to resign.
According to Šimečka, the government will no longer be stable once Taraba returns to Parliament. "We call on the prime minister to simply step down and acknowledge reality. This blow that Parliament has dealt to Robert Fico's government today should be, and in any normal democracy probably would already be, definitive," Šimečka said. He called on the prime minister to "face reality and tender his resignation".
The dismissal Taraba by Parliament is proof that the governing coalition has collapsed, the representatives of the opposition SaS said in response to the vote in Parliament, adding that the government has lost its parliamentary majority and cannot continue as before.
SaS therefore expects Prime Minister Robert Fico to resign while political parties should agree on the earliest possible date for a snap election.
"Tomas Taraba has been dismissed, and that is proof that the governing coalition no longer has a majority in Parliament. Robert Fico can no longer pretend that nothing has happened and that they can simply carry on governing. The coalition agreement is nothing more than a scrap of paper at this point," said SaS chairman Branislav Gröhling.
According to him, continuing to govern without a stable majority would only mean further political deals and uncertainty over every parliamentary vote. Gröhling said it was time to give voters a say again.
Tomas Taraba, should have resigned for the good of the country, yet instead the House had to remove him from office, KDH leader Milan Majerský declared after the no-confidence vote.
"The last time a minister was dismissed in Parliament was 33 years ago. It was minister Viliam Sobona, and today it is minister Taraba. If he had acted with dignity, he would have resigned for the good of the country, but he did not find the strength to do so, and Parliament had to dismiss him. We therefore call on Robert Fico to take the next step as well and submit the government's resignation," Majerský stated.
Prime Minister Robert Fico has been humiliated, opposition 'Slovakia' party leader Igor Matovič said following Parliament's no-confidence vote, adding that he doesn't expect a snap election,.
Matovič added that the opposition had solved the problem for the prime minister.
"The opposition had no other option, it was a must in this situation, and the opposition always has to vote for a minister's ouster. I would, however, like to caution the other opposition leaders against the naive belief that Fico will readily give up power. No, he will treat this as the new reality, reshuffle the pieces, and pretend that he has solved it, even though the opposition had to solve it for him in Parliament," said Matovič.
In May, Taraba, Fico and Danko agreed that if the environment minister and SNS failed to reconcile, Taraba would leave office by the end of September. The agreement ended an open dispute between the party and its nominee at the time.
According to Danko, there has been no substantive discussion with Taraba for a long time, including on important documents prepared by the ministry. SNS stressed that it cannot bear political responsibility for zoning, wind farms, battery plants, pumped-storage power stations, fines imposed on the people for illegal wells, foreign business trips or other projects falling under Taraba's remit.
Taraba repeatedly stated in recent months that he didn't intend to leave his post as minister and that Danko had all the information about the ministry's management. Taraba claimed that he's the only minister in the history of Slovakia to have faced dismissal for doing his job, "saving money and conducting transparent public procurement procedures of an international nature." He declared that "if someone dismisses me for this, I'll respond accordingly". Taraba also stated that if he left the ministry, he'd once again become a politician.
SNS's nominee for the new environment minister is current Deputy Environment Minister Filip Kuffa. President Peter Pellegrini said at the end of August that if there was to be a change of in the post of minister, the nominee must be of higher quality, adding that in Slovakia, there are better-qualified candidates than Kuffa.
Source: TASR
