Slovakia Votes Today in First Combined Municipal and Regional Elections

Polling stations across Slovakia opened at 07:00 today for the country’s first combined municipal and regional elections, and will close at 20:00. Voters are choosing the full layer of local government: city and town mayors, municipal councillors, borough mayors and borough councillors, plus the chairs and councillors of the self-governing regions (bratislava.sk; STVR). The two sets of votes will be held together every four years going forward (Wikipedia: Elections in Slovakia).

The formal campaign ended at 23:59 on Wednesday, 21 October, and an election moratorium has been in force since midnight on Thursday. Until polling stations close, parties, movements, coalitions and candidates are barred from campaigning, opinion polls may not be published, and media may not carry favourable or unfavourable coverage of parties or candidates (STVR).

The right to vote extends beyond Slovak citizens: foreign nationals holding a valid permanent residence permit with a residence card are eligible, provided the “Druh pobytu/Type of permit” field on their documents reads “trvaly” (STVR/TASR). In Bratislava, voters elect the Mayor of Bratislava, the City Council, their borough mayor and borough council, the Chair of the Bratislava Self-Governing Region and the regional councillors (bratislava.sk).

Today’s vote follows a controversy over vote-weight inequality. Public Defender of Rights Róbert Dobrovodský warned that in Bratislava and Košice, 100 votes were enough to elect a candidate in one district while 1,000 votes were not enough in another; the Constitutional Court has already ruled part of the Bratislava legislation unconstitutional. Košice will elect 51 councillors across 14 districts; Bratislava reduced its electoral districts from 17 to 11 while keeping 45 seats (STVR).

As background only — not a prediction: the latest parliamentary polling (Ipsos and FOCUS, both 19 October) has PS and SMER effectively tied at roughly 17–19 per cent (PolitPro).