Reflecting on Saturday's rally of far-right protesters against EU-sponsored migrant quotas, the SME daily looked at to what extent various radical groups united in the protest would be able to succeed in the general election in March 2016. The newspaper wrote that the violent protest, in which over a hundred of people were arrested, showed that extremist groups are able to join forces and indicated that if these radicals formed a political party it could have a good chance to make it to Parliament for the first time, battening on the issue of migration."'If they manage to unite, it's realistic to expect that they could get into Parliament, unfortunately", said director of the Centre for the Research of Ethnicity and Culture (CVEK) Elena Gallová Kriglerová. Moreover, one of the organisers Lukaš Kopač didn't rule out that the People's Party-Our Slovakia (LS-NS) associated with Banská Bystrica region governor Marian Kotleba, who also attended the rally, could be a part of such a political grouping. The daily observes in this regard that Kotleba used to chair a far-right party called Slovenska pospolitost ('Slovak Togetherness'), which was banned by the Supreme Court in 2008.
Political scientist Grigorij Mesežnikov told the daily that the success of extremists in the March 2016 election will depend on how established political parties respond to the violent protest action and the whole issue of migration, as the latter will set the tone of the run-up to the vote. Meanwhile, the daily notes that senior political representatives were slow to react. The Government has failed to seriously condemn the incident and President Andrej Kiska did so only on Sunday afternoon on his Facebook profile.
