Slovak Govt Candidate Leads Presidential Race

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Government candidate Rudolf Schuster has won the first round of Slovakia‘s presidential elections, beating former prime minister Vladimír Mečiar into second place, official results out on Sunday showed. Schuster, the candidate of the country‘s four-party coalition government, took 47.38 percent in Saturday‘s vote, with Mečiar taking 37.24 percent, the central election commission said. Turnout was 73.89 percent. Despite his strong showing, Schuster did not get the 50 percent of all eligible votes required to win outright and a winner-takes-all final round will be fought out between he and Mečiar on May 29. Schuster, popular mayor of the eastern city of Košice, founded one of the four parties in the coalition government. He was a member of the central committee of the Slovak Communist Party prior to 1989. Opinion polls badly underestimated the support of both of the top two candidates, giving Schuster between 30 and 40 percent and Mečiar only 25. None of the remaining candidates, including actress Magda Vášáryová, took more than 10 percent of the votes. Uniquely in Europe, Slovakia has been without a head of state for more than a year. It slipped into constitutional hiatus on March 2 1998 when the last president, Michal Kováč, stepped down at the end of his term of office. Parliament, which at that time was charged with electing the president, was too divided to agree on a compromise candidate. After Vladimír Mečiar lost parliamentary elections in September, the rules were changed to allow for a direct vote of the people. The powers of the president are largely ceremonial but diplomats say that finally filling the post will be an important signal of new-found stability in the country. Slovakia became independent when Czechoslovakia split apart in a peaceful divorce in 1993, but in the years that followed Mečiar‘s government was accused by the domestic opposition and the European Union of backsliding on democratic reforms. The foreign exchange market has been hit by pre-election jitters with the Slovak crown falling to a series of all time lows versus the euro throughout last week.