What Slovakia Is Writing About: Two polls, two possible majorities. Taraba rejected the SNS ultimatum for September 15

Two election preference polls published on Tuesday gave different answers to two practical questions: whether the Democrats would make it into parliament and whether the opposition could form a government without Igor Matovič. Environment Minister Tomáš Taraba rejected the Slovak National Party’s ultimatum that he leave office by September 15, and the decision on abolishing postal voting, which the SNS is making conditional on reducing preference votes, has been postponed to the session that begins that same day. At midnight, the deadline also expires for submitting candidate lists for October’s municipal and regional elections.

Two Polls, Two Answers to the Same Question

The first was published by the Centre for Social Research at the state-run Infostat, which falls under the Statistical Office. According to it, Smer would win the election with 20.4 percent, ahead of Progressive Slovakia with 18.6 percent; SaS would finish third with 9.8 percent, and the Democrats, with exactly six percent, and the Hungarian Alliance, with 5.8 percent, would also enter parliament. Nine parties would cross the electoral threshold, and a coalition of Smer, Hlas and Republika would have only 61 MPs. Aktuality.sk ↗ HN ↗

The second was a model by the Ipsos agency for Denník N. In it, PS leads with 18.1 percent ahead of Smer with 17.9 percent, a difference of two tenths of a point. Republika has 10.9 percent, the Slovakia movement 8.4, SaS and Hlas both 8.2, and KDH 7.3 percent. The Democrats, with 4.7 percent, remain outside parliament together with the Hungarian Alliance, SNS and Sme rodina. Seven parties would therefore enter parliament instead of nine. Four opposition parties would have 79 seats against 71 for Smer, Hlas and Republika, meaning that in this model the government would depend on Matovič. Denník N ↗ Pravda ↗

The difference between the newsrooms was not in the numbers, but in which number they put in the headline. Hospodárske noviny published both polls on the same day, so the reader got from one newsroom both “Smer has overtaken PS, but the opposition would form a government even without Matovič” and “PS, after a significant loss, has fallen back toward Smer.” SME went with the interpretation that the progressives had lost part of their hard core, while Pravda was the only one to put in the headline that the two entities are separated by the statistical margin of error. Denník N and SITA highlighted the Democrats dropping out; Refresher, with the second poll, highlighted the opposite, that the Democrats would get in. Regional websites summed it up most simply: that Smer is leading ahead of the municipal elections. SME ↗ SITA ↗ Refresher ↗

The essential figure, however, was not in the headlines anywhere. Infostat collected data from August 3 to 7 on a sample of 1,046 people, Ipsos from August 18 to 23 on a sample of 1,061 respondents. There are therefore two weeks between the fieldwork periods, but they were published on the same day, so what stand side by side are not two views of one moment, but two different moments. The difference in support for the Democrats, which decides whether the opposition needs Matovič, can be explained by this gap just as well as by a difference in methodology. STVR ↗

September 15 Is Holding Two Different Things at Once

SNS parliamentary caucus chair Roman Michelko spoke about Taraba leaving the environment ministry by September 15. The minister rejected this on Tuesday. “I definitely will not resign on September 15,” he declared, saying that people in SNS can set whatever dates they want. He also rejected the scenario that he would be replaced by State Secretary Filip Kuffa. If it is supposedly possible somewhere to bet on whether Kuffa will be minister, people should, according to him, bet their entire property. “I guarantee you he will not,” he said. Aktuality.sk ↗ Štandard ↗

Kuffa responded that Taraba should remember how he got into parliament and called him a destroyer of pro-national forces. SITA ↗ Denník N ↗

The same date, however, has another meaning as well, one that usually does not appear in reports about Taraba. The vote on abolishing postal voting from abroad, pushed by Smer, was postponed to the session starting on September 15. SNS is conditioning its support on a change to preferential voting; it originally demanded raising the quota from three to eight percent, which met resistance from three MPs around Sports Minister Rudolf Huliak. It now proposes leaving the three-percent quota in place but reducing the number of preference votes from four to two. Michelko described this as a conciliatory step toward the Huliak group and added that the prime minister has leverage over Huliak. If even this version does not pass, SNS will not support the law, according to him. SME ↗

The Court Said the Beaver Cull Was Illegal

The Administrative Court in Bratislava ruled that the Environment Ministry violated the law when, in May 2025, it authorized the killing of 36 protected Eurasian beavers on the Trnávka, Latorica and Bodrog watercourses. The decision was signed directly by Taraba. According to the court, it was not supported by scientific data on the size of the population, the ministry did not sufficiently examine alternatives such as fencing off trees, and it did not document the damage the beavers were allegedly causing. The lawsuit was filed by Aevis and My sme les together with Via Iuris; the court had already temporarily suspended the cull earlier, so not a single beaver was killed. Aktuality.sk ↗ TA3 ↗ Korzár ↗

Pravda picked out from the judgment the wording about damage without evidence and the ignoring of alternatives, while TA3 and Aktuality.sk focused on the fact that the ministry had broken the law. On the same day, Sports Minister Rudolf Huliak opened the topic of bears and claimed that their culling needs to be accelerated. Pravda ↗ Plus jeden deň ↗

Candidate Lists Close at Midnight

The deadline for submitting candidate lists for the combined municipal and regional elections, which will take place on Saturday, October 24, ends on Tuesday at midnight. The Interior Ministry will publish the complete list by the end of September. Shortly before the deadline, independent candidate Dana Čahojová, the mayor of Karlova Ves, withdrew from the race for Bratislava. She justified it by saying she did not want to split the votes of voters who want change in the city leadership. “My ego cannot be more important than the city,” she said, while calling Mayor Matúš Vallo a festival mascot and speaking of a silent coalition and a fraud on voters. Aktuality.sk ↗ TA3 ↗ HN ↗

Vallo is seeking a third electoral term; Bratislava regional governor Juraj Droba is also running for a third mandate, both with the support of the four-party coalition Team Bratislava, PS, SaS and the Democrats. The governing coalition of Smer, Hlas and SNS agreed to field a joint candidate for chair of the Bratislava Self-Governing Region; it will be a nominee of Hlas, though his name was not yet known on the day of the deadline. Well-known faces from national politics are also moving into municipal politics. MP Alojz Hlina is running for SaS for the city council, Michal Kiča is seeking a city mandate for the Democrats, and party chair Jaroslav Naď is running for the regional council. Denník N ↗

Outside Bratislava, the incumbent regional governor Branislav Becík announced his candidacy for chair of the Nitra Region and wants to run his campaign on a tractor; in Košice, the opposition coalition presented a candidate list headed by Marcel Mudrák, and in Trenčín six parties will run on a joint list. Pravda ↗ SITA ↗ TASR ↗

State Money: Costa Began His Tour in Bratislava

European Council President António Costa began a tour of member states in Slovakia on Tuesday concerning the Union’s new multiannual budget for 2028 to 2034. Prime Minister Robert Fico said after the talks that Slovakia’s priorities would be cohesion and agriculture, and that the government does not support the cuts proposed by the European Commission in these policies. Costa said the budget must respond to new threats, with defense and support for eastern regions being key. TASR ↗ Pravda ↗ HN ↗

On the same day, both Fico and President Peter Pellegrini received Montenegro’s president, Jakov Milatović. Both supported the country’s accession to the Union; Pellegrini described 2028 as a realistic date if the member states are serious about enlargement. SITA ↗ TA3 ↗

Under the Radar

Aktuality.sk reported the findings of the police Covid team in the case against a former accountant at the Health Ministry, in which the investigator estimated the damage at almost 1.8 million euros. Over the weekend, the prime minister said that the amount had meanwhile risen by another 300,000 and that it was impossible for one employee to bypass control mechanisms without the ministry leadership’s knowledge. In this context, Deputy Speaker of Parliament Tibor Gašpar mentioned former ministers Marek Krajčí and Vladimír Lengvarský and claimed that it happened with their knowledge. This has not been proven; so far, one person has been charged. Krajčí replied that the act took place only after he had left the ministry and that he did not know the woman; according to Gašpar, Lengvarský did not comment. The article notes that Lengvarský is now deputy director of the Central Military Hospital in Ružomberok, an institution under Robert Kaliňák’s Defence Ministry. Aktuality.sk ↗

At an off-site cabinet meeting, the government declared that decisions on the construction of wind farms would be made by local governments and that the state would not push them through in the regions. TASR ↗ HN ↗

What hotinfo Is Watching