Thousands of people took to the streets across Slovakia and in several European capitals on Tuesday evening to oppose a government proposal that would strip overseas Slovak citizens of the right to vote by post. Demonstrators gathered outside parliament in Bratislava, where around 2,000 people assembled, while hundreds more joined rallies in Košice, Banská Bystrica and Bratislava's second-largest city, as well as in Prague and Brussels. Marching under the slogan "They will not take away our vote!", protesters responded to a call by several opposition parties alarmed by what they see as a deliberate effort to disenfranchise voters living abroad.

The legislative proposal, tabled by Tibor Gašpar — a vice-president of parliament and a member of Prime Minister Robert Fico's left-nationalist Smer-SD party — would end postal voting for Slovaks residing outside the country. Under the current system, citizens abroad can cast ballots by mail in parliamentary elections. The new rules would require them to vote in person at Slovak embassies or specially designated polling stations. The government argues the change is necessary to guarantee ballot secrecy and prevent manipulation, with Gašpar citing the risk that one household member could collect and fill in multiple ballots on behalf of others. In a partial concession to overseas voters, the plan would for the first time allow Slovaks abroad to participate in presidential elections, from which they have previously been excluded.

Opposition figures reject the fraud argument as a pretext. Their suspicion is rooted in hard electoral data: in the 2023 parliamentary elections, nearly 59,000 Slovaks abroad voted by post, with more than 80 per cent backing opposition parties and just 6.1 per cent supporting Smer-SD. Michal Šimečka, leader of the liberal Progressive Slovakia party and the main opposition figure, told the Bratislava crowd that Fico was trying to "cement his power" and that tens of thousands of Slovaks living abroad would effectively be shut out of the next parliamentary election if the reform passed. Šimečka drew comparisons with democratic backsliding in neighbouring Hungary under Viktor Orbán.

The controversy over overseas voting rights fits into a broader pattern of tension surrounding Fico, who returned to power in 2023 after surviving an assassination attempt in 2024 and has since faced repeated mass protests over moves seen as weakening judicial independence, curtailing press freedom and aligning Slovakia more closely with Russia. With parliamentary elections scheduled for 2027 in this central European country of 5.4 million people, the reform debate is shaping up as an early battleground over what kind of democracy Slovakia will be — and who gets a say in deciding it.