At a press conference on Monday, 7 April, in Pozsony (Bratislava), Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia shared that his government coalition is proposing an amendment to the Slovakian Constitution which would dictate that only two genders, male and female, are recognized by the country’s government.
PM Fico stated that he wants to curtail the progressive ideology, which ‘increasingly resembles madness,’ as he put it. He specifically lamented the fact that these days, people can change their gender identity on a daily basis. However, he believes that gender change procedures should only be permitted in rare, exceptional cases.
The Upper Lands (Felvidék)-based news site Új Szó also reports that the Fico administration would also like to add four more amendments to the Constitution related to cultural issues.
Hungary added very similar amendments to its Fundamental Law in December 2020. Paragraph One in Article L of the Hungarian Fundamental Law now states: ‘Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation. Family ties shall be based on marriage or the relationship between parents and children. The mother shall be a woman, the father shall be a man.’
Also in similarity with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, PM Fico appealed to Slovakia’s right as a sovereign nation when he was advocating for the new amendments at the press conference.
‘Imagine that a new human rights pact is adopted [by the EU], which states that marriage can be made between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Okay, they can adopt such a pact, but on the basis of what we propose, it should not take precedence over our laws and our Constitution,’ the Slovak Head of Government argued.
Currently, PM Fico’s Smer party and its coalition hold 79 seats out of 150 in the National Council of Slovakia. Three-fifths of the votes, 90, are needed to amend the constitution, which means the governing parties would have to convince 11 MPs from the opposition to go along in order to pass the proposed constitutional amendments.
Back in March Slovakia was the only other Member State that joined Hungary in its initial opposition to renewing the Union’s sanctions against Russia, which was another case that showed that PM Fico is perhaps the closest to PM Orbán’s worldview within the EU.
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