Voting begins in Slovakia general election

Voting started in Slovakia's general election on Saturday morning, with former prime minister Robert Fico tipped to emerge as the winner. Voting stations in the central European country of 5.4 million opened at 7 am GMT in Bratislava and will close at 10 pm GMT, when exit polls will be released. Official results will be published through the night. Smer, the party led by Fico who was premier from 2006 to 2010 oversaw Slovakia s 2009 euro entry, will take the most votes, according to opinion surveys. Opinion polls show that Fico's Smer social democrats poised to heavily defeat outgoing PM Iveta Radicova's centre-right SDKU. The election comes two years' early after Premier Iveta Radicova s government collapsed in October when a coalition member refused to back the euro area s enhanced rescue mechanism, causing the administration to lose a confidence vote in parliament. The row has slowed efforts to trim the budget deficit. Worsening fiscal prospects, aggravated by the country s dependence on exports to the euro region, led Moody s Investors Service to cut Slovakia s credit rating by one level to A1 and impose a negative outlook.   Smer s popularity has also been helped by the leak of a suspected secret-service file, which suggested corruption ties between businessmen and government officials during the 2002-2006 rule of Mikulas Dzurinda, now a foreign minister. Support for his SDKU party is hovering near the 5 percent threshold to get into parliament and the number of undecided has risen, polls show. With the SDKU badly damaged by the scandal, the most recent opinion polls show Fico is likely to win about 39% of the vote and take 75 seats, just one short of a majority in the 150-member parliament. On Friday, anti-corruption protesters clashed with police in Bratislava. Protest organizers called on Slovaks not to vote for the established political parties, which they said have all been tainted by scandal. About 300 demonstrators pelted police with stones and eggs and officers used tear gas to keep them from storming parliament.