Parliament: Prime Minister Fails to Show Up at House Committee Session

Bratislava, 4 February (TASR) - Prime minister Robert Fico (Smer-SD) didn't appear at a joint session of the House foreign affairs and European affairs committees on Wednesday convened at the request of the opposition, which wanted to hear about Fico's meetings with US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, TASR reported on the same day. The session was quorate, with a sufficient number of committee members in attendance, but the members failed to approve the agenda, so no deliberations were held. Chair of the House foreign affairs committee Marian Kery (Smer-SD) said that he respects the opposition's right to convene committee sessions, but he indicated that the coalition MPs wouldn't have done so in such a case. "As far as I remember, there has been no such situation in which we've invited a prime minister, regardless of whether it was Fico, [Iveta] Radicova, [Peter] Pellegrini, [Igor] Matovic, [Eduard] Heger or [Ludovit] Odor, to a committee meeting to tell us what they discussed," he said, adding that such talks are, for the most part, confidential and held privately. Deputy chair of the foreign affairs committee Tomas Valasek (opposition Progressive Slovakia/PS) responded by saying that it's equally out of line for a prime minister not to give an account of such negotiations three weeks after they were actually held. "A video doesn't suffice," he stressed. According to him, the prime minister must provide information about what he negotiated and with whom. The opposition requested that Fico should brief them on his talks with the US president at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on January 17, his meeting with Macron in Paris on January 29, and the extraordinary European Council summit held on January 22. jrg/df