Parliament: Prime Minister Fails to Show Up at House Committee Session (2)

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. According to PS leader Michal Simecka, the reason why Fico failed to attend the meeting is because he's unable to defend his actions in foreign policy. "Foreign policy shouldn't be owned by the prime minister, it should be a joint foreign policy of the government that is transparent, public and accountable to Parliament," added Simecka, who also pointed to chaos in the government's so-called sovereign foreign policy. "After more than two years, the result we're seeing now is not respect, but isolation and shame in all four cardinal directions. One day he's attacking the European Union along with Donald Trump, and a few days later, the media bring reports about him attacking Trump in Europe. What kind of image does Slovakia have these days?," asked Simecka. Member of the House European affairs committee and opposition Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) MP Vladimira Marcinkova complained about a lack of information. "We wanted to know his official positions; for example, concerning the summit on Greenland, as no House committee session was held, and we've been left in the dark as to what the stance of the Slovak Republic was; not that of Prime Minister Fico, but that of the Slovak Republic". "Likewise, apart from his videos on Facebook, he doesn't inform the public in any way about the outcome of his talks, for example with Emmanuel Macron. Are we going to be part of the coalition of the willing or not? Have we made any progress on this issue? And we have absolutely no idea about what actually happened behind closed doors when he met Donald Trump, which was what the foreign affairs committee wanted to find out," added Marcinkova. The opposition also claims that the prime minister decided not to attend the committee meetings only at the last minute because he was afraid of questions concerning the documents published most recently in connection with US financier Jeffrey Epstein. 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. NOTE: This story has been extended to include paragraphs 6-10 jrg/df