“One day when we were growing up, we would sit around a table with our potential partners and talk about hooking up — and how to make the best apple pie,” he declared on the future of Ďuriš Nicholsonová’s new party.

The SaS first left the coalition government last year after falling out with Igor Matovič’s strongest government group Common People and Independent Personalities (OLaNO) chairman, and then sparked a parliamentary motion of no confidence in the government led by fellow Matovič party, Eduard Heger.

Ďuriš Nicholsonová explained Jablko’s name for the new party “modern, centrist and pro-European” by saying that it was full of established political abbreviations. “There are all kinds of civil democrats, Christian democrats, civil liberals, progressive liberals, hardline Christians. I think it’s very boring,” he said in a video posted on social networks, in which he plays with an apple.

He admitted that there were several names that were toyed with, such as Certainty, Middle Way, Middle, Renewal, but none of them were caught. “It wanted something fresh, something tasty, something juicy, delicious. Something with a good story behind it,” he said.

The name Jablko – in Jabloko’s native language – is already in use by the Russian liberal party founded in 1993. But the last time it won a mandate in the lower house of the Russian parliament was in elections in 2003. According to available data, the party is represented in only four regional assemblies last year. It has the strongest position in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Petersburg.

Former journalist Ďuriš Nicholsonová left SaS in 2021 and switched from conservatives to the Renew Europe (Obnova) faction of the European Parliament, which also includes the movement of former Czech prime minister and presidential candidate Andrej Babiš or French President Emmanuel Macron’s party.