Two months ago, the Slovak Governance Institute, the Pontis Foundation, the Stop Corruption Foundation and Via Iuris approached political parties who had a realistic possibility of forming a government or of getting into parliament with the “I Jingle for Change” initiative. Out of these, six parties that had long-term support over the 5% threshold in opinion polls decided to make a public commitment to implementing anti-corruption measures.

The “I Jingle for Change” initiative is a reaction to the bad quality of the rule of law and the level of our systemic corruption. It was founded because public power in our country is not in the hands of people appointed in the elections, but rather in the hands of people in the background.

In a representative survey, up to 77% of people said that politicians in Slovakia are not held accountable for doing something illegal.

The commitment to actively promote 22 measures concerning the police, the public supervision of prosecutors, increasing the responsibility of courts, making the Supreme Audit Office (NKÚ) more functional, and on revealing the ownership of shell companies and the so-called “feeding” of politicians, was signed by the chairmen of Most-Híd, Sieť,OĽaNO, SaS, KDH and SMK.

“Among the political parties which we had the possibility to discuss this with, an agreement was established about the need to carry out systematic measures in the fight against corruption. They evaluated our proposals as factual and constructive. Smer and SNS did not adopt this public commitment. We are convinced that an anti-corruption agenda has to be an agenda of both the left and the right because systemic corruption has a detrimental influence on the quality of life of all people,” said Milan Šagát, the director of Via Iuris on behalf of the “I Jingle for Change” initiative.

The initiative’s activities will continue after the elections on 5 March. Immediately after the elections and the results, we will pressure the parties which adopted the public commitment and were then appointed to form the government to include our measures into the programme statement of the new government. Thanks to strong support from most of the candidates, we will promote our measures until the appropriate laws are changed in parliament.