BRATISLAVA, August 16, (WEBNOVINY) — LS-HZDS Chairman Vladimir Meciar should go into well-deserved retirement, SNS Chairman Jan Slota believes. “The LS-HZDS chairman is 69 years old and I wish that he live up to the age of 109 and go into well-deserved retirement as soon as possible; it is the high time after those five bypasses he has been through,” said Slota at a press meeting on Tuesday, adding that Meciar has confined his activities to “sulfur spitting.”
New member of the SNS party Miroslav Jurena, who was until recently a member of the LS-HZDS, shares this vision of change to the LS-HZDS management. He said he has left the party so as not to be part of its burrying. “The movement is no longer alive, it is dead and something needs to be done if it still wants to win its way back to the political elite,” Jurena said of the LS-HZDS, of which he had been a member since 1998.
Jurena will be in charge of agricultural politics in SNS. He was appointed head of the agriculture division immediately after obtaining membership in the party on August 13. He has expressed his criticism of common EU agricultural politics, considering it a social institute for western European farmers. “The common agricultural politics appears to be very discriminatory and I perceive this as a national issue because it involves preferential treatment of nations like France, Italy and Spain at the expense of nations that entered the European Union later,” he thinks.
Slota also took a pot shot at Environment Minister Zsolt Simon (MOST-HID), accusing him of intentionally harming Slovak interests, with regard, for example, to the case of Tokaj wine or Slovak bryndza, traditional Slovak soft cheese originally made only from sheep milk. “We are literally placing a square peg in a round hole. It is downright evident that the ministry is led by a Hungarian-like stink,” offered Slota.
Slota further said that other people from LS-HZDS are interested in joining the SNS ranks, but was tight-lipped about specific names. He also said that sometimes whole local organizations headed by municipal chairmen are interested in membership.
Still as a member of LS-HZDS, Jurena ran the Agriculture Ministry in the Robert Fico Cabinet. He had to quit after Fico demanded his recall from office in November 2007 in connection with assignment of plots in Velky Slavkov. Jurena put up an emotional defense at a press briefing in front of a cowshed at a collective farm in Vajnory.
SITA