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Bloomberg
Slovaks are voting in a presidential runoff that will probably lift a liberal pro-European Union lawyer to the nation’s highest office in a rebuke of the populism that’s sweeping parts of the bloc’s ex-communist wing.
Zuzana Caputova, a 45-year-old, captured a strong lead in support before the ballot. Poised to become Slovakia’s first woman president, she swept up more than twice as many votes in the March 16 first round than her opponent Maros Sefcovic, a top EU Commission official who’s running for the ruling Smer party. Polls opened on Saturday and were expected to close at 10 pm.
The driving issue in the election is public anger sparked by last year’s double murder of an investigate reporter, who wrote about high-level graft, and his fiancee. The ensuring outrage triggered the largest protests since the fall of the Iron Curtain and forced three-time Premier Robert Fico to resign. It has also lifted Caputova, who campaigned under the slogan “let’s fight the evil together,†from relative obscurity to the heavy favorite of voters who want to punish Fico’s ruling Smer party.
The Czechs last year gave a second term to President Milos Zeman, known for his pro-Russian views.