Slovakia Wakes Up to a ‘New Era Without Fico’

"Please believe me, as I stand here, that together with other leaders of democratic parties, we will try to create the best government Slovakia has ever had," Matovic said on Sunday morning.

Two years after the brutal murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée shocked the country, parliamentary elections have brought palpable change to Slovakia.

It is not a change predicted by analysts or polls. Nor is it the kind of change longed for by liberals who had hoped to see the Progressive Slovakia/Together (PS/SPOLU) coalition in government following success last year in presidential and European Parliament elections.

In the end, PS/SPOLU was left out in the cold, despite winning more votes than two other parliamentary parties. They fell short of the minimum seven per cent threshold needed to enter parliament as a coalition — by fewer than a 1,000 votes.

Michal Truban and Miroslav Beblavy, leaders of PS and SPOLU, respectively, announced their resignations on Monday.

The final vote tally confirmed the emergence of OLANO as the major new force in Slovak politics after more than a decade of rule by the populist-left SMER-SD.

It was a rise as spectacular as it was unanticipated.

At the end of last year, Matovic's party was polling at between five and six per cent. In January, it inched up to eight per cent. After several well-wrought campaign moves by Matovic, it was hovering around 13-15 per cent two weeks before the election.

Then on Saturday, OLANO won an overwhelming 25 per cent of the vote.

"I think I'm still dreaming," Matovic said on Sunday morning in a sports hall in Trnava, a historical city dubbed "little Rome", where he had spent election night with 2,000 guests.

"David beating...