BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – A former authoritarian prime minister led after the first round of Slovakia's presidential election and will move on to a runoff against a former political ally, according to final results released Sunday.
Vladimir Meciar, whose rule was criticized by Western leaders for its lack of democracy and rule of law, won 32.7 percent of the vote in Saturday's election, said Boris Balog, chairman of the Central Election Commission.
Ivan Gasparovic, who left Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia in 2002 to form his own party, was second with about 22.3 percent of the vote. The candidate who had topped most polls before the vote, Foreign Minister Eduard Kukan, trailed in third place with 22.1 percent.
Meciar and Gasparovic will advance to the April 17 runoff, Balog said. The role of president is largely ceremonial.
The turnout in Saturday's vote was 47.94 percent, far below expectations, the commission said.
Also Saturday, a referendum asking for parliamentary elections to be held two years early didn't get the required turnout of 50 percent, according to preliminary results. The referendum was initiated by the opposition and labor unions who say the government's economic reforms have left poor Slovaks even worse off.
The winner of the presidential runoff will help guide Slovakia in its first years in NATO and the European Union. Slovakia joined the NATO alliance earlier this week, and becomes an EU member on May 1.
Saturday's result is bound to attract attention from Slovakia's new allies.
"The result is a great surprise," Grigorij Meseznikov, the director of the IVO think tank, told The Associated Press. "It won't change things with NATO or the EU, as we're already there, but probably trust toward Slovakia will not be as it should be."
If Meciar wins the run-off, the West will likely "behave toward him as in the past," Meseznikov said. Even Gasparovic, who once shared many of Meciar's views, would likely face the same lack of trust.
Meciar, an ex-boxer and night-school law graduate, took the republic of 5.4 million people to nationhood in 1993, after it and the Czech Republic gave up on Czechoslovakia and went their own ways.
But his rule was clouded by allegations of authoritarianism and corruption.
By the time he was voted out of office in 1998, Slovakia was shunned by the United States and Western Europe, and both his popularity and that of his right-leaning Movement for a Democratic Slovakia faded.
In 1999, he ran for the presidency in Slovakia's first direct elections, but lost in a runoff to President Rudolf Schuster.
Viliam Sobona, an official in Meciar's party, was not worried.
"I'm not afraid that Mr. Meciar's possible election could stir mixed reaction abroad," he said. "From what we know, and we've been monitoring it for some time, the position of (officials) abroad toward him has changed in his favor."
Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda, whose government has worked hard to improve Slovakia's image after Meciar's rule, was disappointed over Kukan's failure to advance, blaming it on low turnout and voter apathy.
"Undoubtedly I'll think over the future of the whole party, its structures, but of course also of myself," Dzurinda was quoted as saying by the TASR news agency.
