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PRAGUE — Slovakian Health Minister Marek Krajčí resigned Friday following a government crisis sparked by Prime Minister Igor Matovič’s decision to unilaterally purchase Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.
Finance Minister Eduard Heger will replace Krajčí on a temporary basis. Both are members of Matovič’s Ordinary People party.
In accepting the resignation, President Zuzana Čaputová bluntly made clear Krajčí had lost support. “The fact is that you did not succeed in enforcing some of your key recommendations,” she said, adding that even his own ministers didn’t support him. “That is why the situation has been deteriorating continuously.”
His resignation comes as Slovakia faces a catastrophic situation with the pandemic. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the country now has the highest per capita death rate in Europe, averaged over the last two weeks.
The political crisis erupted after Matovič purchased 2 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine without consulting his coalition partners. He then traveled to the Košice airport on March 1 to personally welcome the first 200,000 doses. The move provoked anger in the coalition’s two smallest parties, For the People and Freedom and Solidarity, because the European Medicines Agency has yet to approve the jab.
The EMA began a rolling review of the Sputnik jab last week, but it remains unclear if or when it will green-light the vaccine.
The two parties then threatened to leave the government, depriving Matovič of his parliamentary majority, unless he agreed to a government reshuffle that could include him stepping down.
Matovič at first appeared to concede, saying the Sputnik manufacturer had offered to take the vaccine back without demanding a penalty. However, he changed his mind two days later, saying on Facebook: “I cannot refuse to save our people with a quality vaccine because it is made in Russia. … I am not a killer.”
The confusion continued Thursday, when the coalition parties announced they found a solution that included Krajčí’s resignation. Just hours later, Matovič changed his mind again, denouncing the two parties for using Sputnik as a pretext to attack the health minister and announcing Krajčí’s departure — but not until the Sputnik rollout was fully launched.
“I want the new minister to be in office with the current minister for a few weeks so that it does not affect the protection of people’s lives,” he told journalists.
However, Krajčí then took to Facebook to declare that he would step down immediately. “I don’t want the deadline for my departure to be a pretext for the government’s downfall,” he said.
But his resignation has not defused the government crisis. Leaders of the two renegade parties publicly condemned Matovič’s about-face and declared that the agreement reached 24 hours earlier was now null and void. The head of Freedom and Solidarity, Economy Minister Richard Sulík, told journalists in Bratislava on Friday: “We are at point zero.”
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