Opposition party Smer wins in Slovakia

The Smer party has maintained its position as the largest party in the Slovak parliament following elections held on March 10. Votes have been counted in 96 percent of the election precincts.According to the Statistics Office of the Slovak Republic, which has been publishing preliminary results as returns arrive from each precinct, Smer leads with 44.84 percent, followed by the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) with 8.77 percent.
Third is Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) with 8.49 percent, followed by Most-Híd, which has so far received 6.89 percent.

The center-left opposition scored a landslide victory in Saturday's general election in Slovakia.
The election committee announced on Sunday that the social-democratic party, Smer, won 83 of the 150 seats in parliament, while the ruling camp was reduced to only 35 seats. The social democrat opposition in Slovakia has won the general election but has fallen short of an overall majority. Smer party would emerge as by far the biggest party, its leader Robert Fico said that he expected his party to be charged by President Ivan Gašparovič with forming the next government.

Central Electoral Commission (ÚVK) on March 11 officially confirmed the results of Saturday's general election, in which Smer party received 44.41 percent of the votes and will take 83 seats in the House, TASR newswire reported.Aside from Smer, five other parties have cleared the 5-percent threshold needed to win parliamentary representation. The Christian Democrats were the runners-up on 8.82 percent, followed by the Ordinary People and Independent Personalities with 8.55 percent. These two parties will both send 16 representatives to parliament.The largely ethnic-Hungarian Most-Híd party was backed by 6.89 percent of the voters (13 seats), while the erstwhile leading coalition SDKÚ party received only 6.09 percent, slightly more than the liberal Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) on 5.88 percent. SDKÚ and SaS will have 11 MPs each.The Slovak National Party (SNS) and its arch-rival the ethnic-Hungarian SMK fell short of making it to parliament on 4.55 percent and 4.28 percent, respectively. Both will retain the status of parliamentary parties by virtue of gaining more than 3 percent and thus will receive state funding to run their operations.
 In October of last year, the ruling coalition could not agree on a bill on the eurozone bailout fund expansion.
The bill was approved with Smer's support in return for an early general election, originally scheduled for 2014.

Posted just now by Nksagar