Opposition Freedom and Solidarity Plans to Focus on Four Key Areas in New Year

Bratislava, January 9 (TASR) - The opposition Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party plans to focus on four key areas in the new year, namely finance, justice, education and health care, TASR has learnt from an interview with the party's leader Branislav Groehling. Groehling added that the party expects new personalities to join it, including one that will focus on security, and it aims to open itself up to new members while working in the regions, "We've been perceived as a Bratislava-based parliamentary party. However, I've now thrown the party open. We are accepting new people from all over Slovakia. We've opened our headquarters in Kosice, the Centre-right House, where we hold discussions and workshops, where we talk to people about why economic growth and the economy are important for our country. I'm a person who can unite and reach agreements, which is why we've also created the Centre-right Bloc, in which we're bringing together other centre-right parties that we cooperate with, as well as other personalities who will join the Centre-right Bloc," he remarked. Groehling, according to him, doesn't want the party to be built around just one person. "I'm building SaS to be a clearly centre-right party, which both liberals and moderate conservatives can join," he remarked. During the interview Groehling also highlighted several successes and positive outcomes that SaS has achieved in the past year. "It is very difficult to push something forward as an opposition party, so I'm very pleased that in the past months we've managed to draw attention to numerous failures by the governing coalition, such as an increase in value-added tax (VAT), the introduction of the transaction tax, and issues in health care," he noted. He emphasised that a number of times when SaS lawmakers have raised issues this has led to a correction or action taken to address the problem. He mentioned, for example, the trading of umbilical cord blood and the transaction tax applied to charities. lin/df