Andrej Danko, leader of the junior coalition party, the far-right SNS, offered to give up all ministries currently held by the SNS to keep the left-right coalition of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico together.

“In these hard times it is important that nobody sticks to his post and that everyone is capable of giving it up with one goal – to secure the functioning of the coalition in the future,” SNS party communication head Zuzana Škopcová was quoted as saying by the Slovak press agency TASR following a meeting between Danko and Fico on February 17.

SNS nominees Tomáš Taraba, Martina Šimkovičová and Dušan Keleti hold the ministries of culture, environment and sports and tourism.

Škopcová also praised their work, stating that the “chairman of SNS is convinced that the government cannot fall, that early elections cannot be called, while he also thanks publicly all the SNS ministers”.

Fico’s coalition, which held the narrow majority of 79 in the parliament of 150 when formed in 2023, was left scrapping for votes after three rebel legislators left the SNS parliamentary grouping and demanded a ministerial portfolio in return for continued support of the ruling coalition.

Recently, centre-left Hlas expelled two of its legislators who criticised Hlas converging with Smer’s and SNS radical national conservative agenda, including the purges carried out by Šimkovičová at the country’s key cultural institutions.   

All three ruling coalition parties have been in talks over a government reshuffle aimed at keeping the parliamentary majority together. 

Fico gave SNS and Hlas and ultimatum of February 17 to reach a deal with their rebelling legislators, signaling again early elections could be a real possibility for Smer, which managed to halt its faltering popularity after Fico further radicalised his rhetoric, aligning it with Kremlin talking points and loudly praising Trump's overhaul of the public administration in the US.

SNS is struggling to reach a 5% parliamentary threshold in the polls, as bne IntelliNews covered.

The largest opposition party, Progressive Slovakia, maintains a lead (22.1%) ahead of the ruling Smer (21.7%), while Smer’s key ally, conservative centre-left Hlas (11.8%), would come third in the latest poll by Focus agency, followed by non-parliamentary neofascist Republika (7.8%) and opposition parties Christian Democratic KDH (7.8%), neoliberal SaS (6.2%), and populist right-wing Slovakia (5.6%).

Ethnic Hungarian Aliancia (4.6%) would narrowly miss the parliamentary 5% threshold, as would centre-right Democrats (4.6%), while support for junior ruling coalition party far-right SNS has declined further to 3.6%.