Igor Matovič

Prime Minister Matovič with mouth and nose cover due to the COVID-19 pandemic (May 2020)

Igor Matovič (born May 11, 1973 in Trnava ) is a Slovak politician and Prime Minister of Slovakia since March 2020 . He has been chairman of the Obyčajní ľudia a nezávislé osobnosti ( Common People and Independent Personalities ) party since it was founded .

Life

Matovič studied from 1993 to 1998 at the Faculty of Management at the Comenius University in Bratislava and was an entrepreneur from 1997. Before his political career, he was the director of regionPRESS, which he founded in 2002 and which he gave to his wife Pavlína in 2007.

In the 2010 parliamentary elections , he was the 150th and final candidate on the Sloboda a Solidarita (SaS, "Freedom and Solidarity") party list, as a member of the four-member group Obyčajní ľudia . By preferential votes , however, he landed in fourth place and became a member of the SaS, which became a coalition party.

After a vote against the coalition, he was expelled from the SaS in February 2011. After a few months as an independent, he founded the Obyčajní ľudia a nezávislé osobnosti (OĽaNO) party in November 2011 with other members of the Obyčajní ľudia group . In the parliamentary elections in 2012 , it entered parliament as the third strongest force; Matovič received the most preference votes after running for the last place again. In the 2016 parliamentary elections , the OĽaNO won again and became the third strongest force with 11.02%. Matovič moved again as a member of the National Council.

With Matovič as the top candidate in the National Council elections on February 29, 2020, the OĽaNO became the strongest force with 25.02% and has since provided 53 of 150 members. Matovič was commissioned by President Zuzana Čaputová to form a government. He formed a coalition of OĽaNO and the parties Sme Rodina - Boris Kollár , Sloboda a Solidarita and Za ľudí . His cabinet was sworn in on March 21, 2020 .

In July 2020, Matovič survived a vote of no confidence after the investigative newspaper Denník N published allegations of plagiarism on his master's thesis. He has admitted to having plagiarized his master’s thesis, apologized for it and promised to resign as soon as “all election promises have been fulfilled”. In the run-up, allegations of plagiarism and compilation met the President of Parliament Boris Kollár and the Minister of Education Branislav Gröhling .

Web links

• Igor Matovič on the website of the Slovak Parliament (Slovak)
• Curriculum vitae on the O slowaNO website (Slovak)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Extract from the commercial register (Slovak), accessed on May 25, 2012
2. ^ Coalition loses another MP , The Slovak Spectator , accessed on May 25, 2012
3. ↑ Slovak head of government survives vote of no confidence , nau.ch, accessed on August 20, 2020
4. ↑ Plagiarism: Slovak Prime Minister Matovič expects a vote of no confidence , derStandard.at, accessed on August 20, 2020