Slovakia's New President is Ivan Gasparovic

The name of the third President of the Slovak Republic is known. Ivan Gasparovic defeated Vladimir Meciar with 59.91% of votes against 40.09% in the second round of presidential elections with turnout of 43.50%. Out of 4.2 million registered voters, 1.8 million voted for one of the candidates. Gasparovic obtained 1,079,592 votes, while Meciar 722,368. Spokesman for the Central Election Commission Juraj Horvath informed SITA news agency about the preliminary unofficial results on Sunday night.

Eleven candidates ran in the first round of direct presidential elections on 03 April 2004. Six of them had a wider support of political parties or non-governmental organizations and finally obtained more than 5%. Only two of them could advance to the second round: Vladimir Meciar with 33% and Ivan Gasparovic with 22%. Third Eduard Kukan, who was already expected as the hottest candidate for the new President, lost to Ivan Gasparovic only with a few thousand votes. Current President Rudolf Schuster finished at the fourth position with less than 8%, followed by Frantisek Miklosko and Martin Butora.

For many people, it was a shocking news, that two opposition candidates advanced to the second round. The searching for a "smaller evil" from 1999 happened again. Five years ago, former communist official Rudolf Schuster and three-times Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar met in the second round and many people voted for Schuster only because they didn't want to see Meciar at the President of Slovakia. Similar situation happened in 2002 in France, where the rightist Jacques Chirac received support from most voters in the second round only because the extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen did it into the second round against him. In France, people voted with surgeon gloves and clothes pin. Yesterday, only one man used rubber gloves and the police opened the box with envelopes and investigated whether an explosive has been thrown into the box. The suspicion has not been proved, but the right to vote anonymously has been violated.

In Slovakia of 2004, the "smaller evil" is not that clear. Ivan Gasparovic was the speaker of the Parliament during the times where Meciar was the Prime Minister. They were together in the times, where Slovakia got isolated from the integration process into the European Union and NATO. Gasparovic left Meciar's party only when Meciar did not include him on the list of candidates for the 2002 elections. Not before. Gasparovic's advantage is that he is not as known as Meciar and has more chances to be accepted abroad than his former party leader.

Ivan Gasparovic was born on 27 March 1941 in Poltar in the region of Banska Bystrica. He studied at the Law Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava and worked there afterwards. In 1990 he became the Attorney General of Czechoslovakia. In 1992 he was elected the deputy for the Vladimir Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) and became the speaker of the Slovak Parliament until 1998. Then he was again elected as the deputy for HZDS, but when Vladimir Meciar did not include him on the list of candidates for the 2002 Elections, he left the party and founded his own Movement for Democracy (HZD), which was unsuccessful in the elections and Gasparovic had to return to the Law Faculty. Ivan Gasparovic is married and has two children.

The term in office for incumbent President Rudolf Schuster ends on 15 June 2004. The third President Ivan Gasparovic, which is, like all his predecessors, former speaker of the parliament, will enter the Presidential Palace afterwards.