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After hours of debate, the final vote on approving new powers for the €440 billion European Financial Stability Facility failed late on Tuesday evening with only 55 of the parliament’s 150 MPs voting in favour, causing the coalition government of Iveta Radicova to collapse. Slovakia is the last of the 17 eurozone countries to approve the improved rescue fund. The political drama in Bratislava should not disrupt enhancements to the EFSF for long, but it underlines how fraught the political debate has become in some eurozone creditor countries.
Three of the four parties in Ms Radicova’s coalition support it and the left-wing opposition SMER party led by Robert Fico – who called the vote a “fiasco” for the government – indicated that it would be prepared to support the measure. “There is an assumption that, one way or another, the EFSF will be approved by the end of the week,”, Ivan Miklos, the finance minister, told parliament during a fiery debate that captured the attention of officials across the EU.
The Slovak crisis was ignited by Richard Sulik, the inflexible leader of the Freedom and Solidarity party, who insisted that increasing the EFSF and allowing it to recapitalise banks and buy sovereign bonds would be useless because Greece is already bankrupt, and would be costly for Slovakia.
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