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Kalinak Survives No-confidence Vote in Parliament and Remains on His Post
Friday 29 January 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, January 29 (TASR) - Interior Minister Robert Kalinak (Smer-SD) has survived the vote of no-confidence submitted against him by the Opposition in an extraordinary parliamentary session. Therefore, he remains in his post.
In the vote, following a seven-hour debate in the House, only 44 out of 97 lawmakers voted for the minister's dismissal, which doesn't represent the required simple majority of all MPs - that is, at least 76 votes.
All present coalition lawmakers (under Smer-SD, SNS and LS-HZDS) voted against, in support of Kalinak.
The move is a response to the scandalous incident on January 2, in which an airport security exercise went awry and resulted in a sample of explosives being sent to Dublin in the luggage of an unwitting Slovak traveller. The Opposition first called on Kalinak to resign over the explosives incident on his own initiative, which he refused to do, calling the incident a "fatal error" made by an individual police officer and not a system failure.
In response to the vote, Kalinak said that the Opposition "has never offered an alternative, and their only ability is to scandalise".
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