As part of a venerable Washington tradition of taking credit for things (even when your role is too small to even measure), I'm delighted to report that my speeches must have had a big impact. The parties sympathetic to free-markets and limited government prevailed in the recent Czech elections. Then, just this past weekend, the pro-market parties won a majority in the Slovak elections. When Dan Mitchell speaks, people listen.
On a more serious note, the Slovak elections are particularly important since the victorious parties include some remarkably good people such as Ivan Miklos, Richard Sulik, and Martin Chren. Here's a blurb from an election summary in the Wall Street Journal:
Preliminary results showed the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union, or SDKU, with 15.4% of the vote, followed by the liberal Freedom and Solidarity Party, or SaS, with 12.1%, the Christian Democratic Movement KDH with 8.5%, and the Hungarian minority party Most-HID with 8.1%. Final election results are expected late Sunday. The new parliament will thus be dominated by right-of-center parties led by the Christian Democratic SDKU, and the Hungarian minority party Most-HID. This coalition of four that will also include the Christian Democratic KDH and the liberal Freedom and Solidarity Party, and will hold a total of 79 parliament seats, compared with 62 seats to be held by Smer. The remaining nine mandates will be in the hands of the extremist Slovak Nationalist Party, or SNS. The Freedom and Solidarity Party was formed last year by Richard Sulik, an economist who designed the flat-rate tax system introduced by the previous SDKU-led governments that ruled in 1998-2006.
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