Thirteen Men and Two Women to Vie for Post of President

Bratislava, February 1 (TASR) - A total of fifteen candidates are set to contest the post of Slovak president, as the deadline for submitting bids passed on January 31. Four candidates haven't been verified yet. There are two female and thirteen male candidates. The list of the candidates in alphabetical order is as follows: Bela Bugar, Zuzana Caputova, Eduard Chmelar, Martin Dano, Stefan Harabin, Marian Kotleba, Milan Krajniak, Jozsef Menyhart, Frantisek Miklosko, Robert Mistrik, Maros Sefcovic, Robert Svec, Bohumila Tauchmannova, Juraj Zabojnik and Ivan Zuzula. Kotleba, Krajniak, Sefcovic and Zuzula are still waiting for their candidacies to be verified. A committee is examining whether they met all the legal requirements and will subsequently recommend to Parliamentary Chairman Andrej Danko (Slovak National Party/SNS) whether he should or shouldn't accept their candidacies. Danko has already rejected Radovan Znasik's bid. He won't be forty years old on the day of the election [the law states that presidential candidates have to be forty years old - ed. note]. Danko also rejected the candidacy of Jan Molnar due to "strong suspicions". Molnar obtained signatures for his candidacy from MPs who thought that they were signing as Slovak citizens, but the petition form was subsequently altered to make it appear that they had signed as MPs. Another rejected candidate was Martin Konecny, who brought only 164 signatures from the public. A candidate either has to obtain 15,000 signatures from the public or 15 signatures from MPs in order to be eligible to run for president. Only Dano and Sefcovic counted on the latter; the rest of the fifteen candidates collected signatures from the public. The first round of the presidential election will be held on March 16, with a possible second round, if the head of state isn't elected in the first one, slated to take place on March 30. zel/df