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Paska: People's Backing Makes Us Want to Complete Term
Sunday 27 December 2009 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, December 27 (TASR) - Representatives of the governing Coalition want to complete their term in office because they feel people's support, Parliamentary Chairman and vice-chairman of the leading coalition Smer-SD party Pavol Paska has told TASR.
"It would probably be pretty risky vis-a-vis voters if we set about marring the environment in the Coalition via mutual attacks. I hope a decent way of determining the interests of the Coalition will be found, be it at the level of leaders of the coalition parties or at the level of Parliament," he added. Paska was referring to the fact that the Coalition Agreement expires six months prior to the general election due in June 2010, which means that the parties will no longer be obliged to co-operate.
What matters is that co-operation works between the parties and that problems that occurred during the former cabinet's term are no longer the case, added Paska, who claimed that the leaders of the former coalition (2002-06) resorted to harsh words when referring to each other, such as when the-then KDH party leader Pavol Hrusovsky called former premier Mikulas Dzurinda (1998-2006) a "perfidious person".
"MPs left and joined parties in a haphazard manner, nobody had any idea about who had made an agreement with whom and on what foundations, not to speak of vote-buying," said Paska. "And they no doubt had a fine-tuned coalition agreement that, however, became just a scrap of paper a few weeks after the coalition was set up and in the three years to come meant absolutely nothing as far as the functioning of the coalition went," he added.
This shows that anything can be put down on paper, and a coalition agreement is thus not that important. "What matters is that we're approaching the end of the term and we've approved a budget as a Coalition," stressed Paska.
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