SLOVAKIA: Tensions rose in Slovakia's ruling coalition yesterday when parliament approved a draft law on abortion at the heart of a battle over the role of religion in the largely Catholic country.
Parliament backed the bill, designed around the European norm of allowing abortions into a 24th week of pregnancy in cases of genetic defects, 70-32 with 30 abstentions.
A heated debate over the issue has caused hostility between the cabinet's most conservative and liberal factions, but the Prime Minister, Mr Mikulas Dzurinda, said he would work to keep the government together .
The ruling Christian Democrat party (KDH) said if the law came into effect it would call for the ministers of the government's most liberal member party and author of the draft law, ANO, to be dismissed. The mostly poor former communist state has been increasingly in the world spotlight.
On Tuesday, its parliament became the first in 10 mostly eastern European countries to ratify a treaty enabling them to join the 15-member European Union next year.
Liberals in Slovakia, a country of 5.4 million people, fear the conservative, religious agenda of the KDH is creeping into daily life after decades of being pushed underground by communism.
KDH's policies include calls for compulsory Catholic studies in state schools and blocking equal rights for homosexuals.
"The coalition is in crisis," KDH chairman, Mr Pavol Hrusovsky, told journalists after the vote. The bill must still be approved by President Rudolf Schuster to take effect, while Mr Dzurinda and his SDKU party have said they are set on preventing the government's collapse.
"I ensure you that I will act in a way to calm the situation and to maintain stability in Slovakia," Mr Dzurinda said, adding he believed the coalition would stay together.
"There is no other alternative. The best solution is to overcome this unpleasant moment and keep going on."
The crown slid immediately after the vote but the currency then found support from foreign buying, recovering most of its losses at the close of the session.
ANO, backed by the opposition in the vote, said it expected a veto from Mr Schuster and the bill to return to parliament. Mr Schuster's spokesman said the president would probably use all 15 days allowed to study the law before making a decision. SDKU and the remaining coalition party, the ethnic-Hungarian SMK, do not back the bill, saying a Health Ministry decree has already made the proposed abortion rule legal.
ANO pushed for the law after KDH moved to nullify the decree by contesting it in the Constitutional Court. The court will rule on the issue in September.
Analysts said they believed the issue would not topple the coalition because if Mr Schuster vetoes the bill, ANO and the opposition would be hard pressed to then find the 76 votes they would need to override the decision.
Neither the ANO nor KDH party has offered to withdraw from the ruling grouping over the issue, they added.