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ABSTRACT
Government parties suffered defeat in the November 2017 regional elections in Slovakia. The Direction-Social Democracy (Smer), the senior coalition partner, managed to remain the party with the largest share of elected regional deputies. However, its strength was significantly reduced, both when compared to the 2016 national elections and the 2013 regional contests. The democratic center-right opposition managed to coordinate and compete effectively against the governing parties. Its success was apparent in the gubernatorial contests, where its candidates defeated most of the Smer-backed incumbents. The democratic opposition was less successful in elections to regional assemblies. Their most significant result is a dramatic increase in the share of independent deputies who constitute the largest virtual group of deputies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Some 7% of the inhabitants did not respond to the 2011 census question about their ethnicity.
2. This was the official reasoning presented by the group of parliamentarians who proposed the legislative change. See the official explanatory report supplementing the constitutional amendment, available at https://www.nrsr.sk/web/Default.aspx?sid=zakony/zakon&ZakZborID=13&CisObdobia=7&CPT=303. For a similar argumentation voiced in the parliamentary debate, see http://tv.nrsr.sk/transcript?id=172219.
4. As reported by Dugovič (Citation2018) some 11% of the independent deputies elected in the 2018 local elections ran with a party label in 2014. Local and regional elections in Slovakia use identical electoral system and return a similarly high share of independents to the local assemblies.
5. See The 2017 Annual Reports of SaS and OĽaNO, available at https://www.minv.sk/?vyrocnespravypc2017. In contrast, the extra-parliamentary SMK reported 9197 members and the KDH had 8948 members.