On the day after the successful vote of no confidence in the Slovakian government, President Zuzana Čaputová officially dismissed the previous cabinet and at the same time instructed it to continue government business for the time being.

Prime Minister Eduard Heger should now ensure that a new election can be held in advance by the middle of next year, Čaputová told journalists in the capital Pressburg (Bratislava) on Friday.

Stephen Lowenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

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Heger should do everything necessary to enforce the necessary legal framework for an early election (the regular one would not be until the beginning of 2024) in parliament by the end of January at the latest.

"I consider it necessary that new elections take place in the first half of next year," said Čaputová.

If this did not happen, she threatened to appoint a civil servant government.

On Thursday, after days of government deliberations, Parliament voted no confidence with 78 of the 150 MPs (102 of whom were present).

The Heger cabinet has governed without a majority of its own since last summer, since one of the four coalition parties, the liberal SaS under Richard Sulík, dropped out of the dispute.

Above all, the erratic and arbitrary Finance Minister Igor Matovič, head of the strongest coalition party Olano, is controversial.

He had already resigned as head of government in 2021 in favor of his party colleague Heger.

However, he did not want to leave the government altogether.

Matovič was also the center of attention on the crucial day.

Shortly before the start of the planned vote on the no-confidence motion tabled by the SaS, he went to the President's office and announced that he would hand in his resignation after all.

The SaS's main demand appeared to have been met, but the party was reluctant to agree to a postponement of the vote of no confidence.

Rightly so, as it turned out: Matovič handed his signed resignation letter to an official in the presidential office, cell phone to his ear, then asked for a copy and finally took the copy and the original back from the official's hands.

He later explained that a good friend advised him against it over the phone, so he changed his mind.

Has it never happened to anyone that they regretted and revised a decision?

While the MPs from Matovič's Olano party left the hall in one body, some coalition representatives voted in favor of the motion of no confidence.

They probably shared SaS boss Sulík's view that the government had thrown the country into chaos.

In 2020, the centre-right coalition came into power with the aim of restoring decency and the rule of law.

Corruption and mafia connections had become endemic under long-time Prime Minister Robert Fico.

The murder of the journalist Ján Kuciak, whose research had uncovered mafia involvement that reached as far as the judiciary and the security authorities, became a beacon.

Reforms have actually taken hold there.

But the government has gambled away its credit through erratic measures and internal strife - among the population,