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After that activity in parliament he temporarily returned to the Comenius University Law Faculty. He was a member of the Scientific Council of the Comenius University and of the Scientific Council of the Law Faculty of that university. In late 1992, he was one of the authors of the Constitution of Slovakia.


n 1992 Gašparovič joined the HZDS, Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko, led by Vladimír Mečiar. He was one of the central figures of prime minister Mečiar's administration that was generally perceived as authoritarian. He became Speaker of the National Council of the Slovak Republic (NRSR) after the victory of the HZDS in the June 1992 elections. When a scandal erupted over the discovery of microphones in the U.S. Consulate in November 1992, Gašparovič was asked by Mečiar to head a commission to investigate the background of the affair, but the results were inconclusive. Later that year, when Mečiar's government attempted to close down opposition-led Trnava University, Gašparovič sided with the prime minister, echoing his argument that its opening was "illegal." The West viewed the regime as untrustworthy and the country was excluded from the EU and NATO expansion talks that went on at the time at the neighbouring central European countries.


The period of the HZDS rule was among other things marked by persistent animosity between the HZDS-led government and the country's president Michal Kováč, a vocal opponent of the Mečiar regime. The conflict had gotten to the point where the Slovak secret service SIS was alleged to have kidnapped the president's son, Michal Jr., plying him with alcohol and dropping him in front of a police station in nearby Hainburg Austria, a country where he was wanted on suspicion of financial fraud.


From October 1998 to 15 July 2002, when the HZDS was an opposition party, Gašparovič was a member of the parliamentary Committee for the Supervision of the SIS (the Slovak equivalent of CIA). He was also a member of the delegation of the Slovak parliament in the Interparliamentary Union.

In July 2002 after four years in opposition Gašparovič left the HZDS after Mečiar decided not to include him and some other HZDS members on the ballot for the upcoming elections. Gašparovič along with the other members immediately (on July 12) founded a new party, the Hnutie za demokraciu (HZD), a name bearing a close resemblance to the former HZDS. The cited reasons for the departure were internal disputes within the party, or as Gašparovič puts it, a "protest against the undemocratic way the party is led by Vladimír Mečiar." In the September 2002 elections his party polled 3.3 percent, not enough to win seats in the parliament. After the elections, Gašparovič returned to the Law Faculty of the Comenius University and wrote several university textbooks as well as working papers and studies on criminal law.


In April 2004 Gašparovič decided to run for the presidency against Vladimír Mečiar , then governing coalition's candidate Eduard Kukan. In an unexpected turn of events, the perceived underdog Gašparovič received the second highest number of votes and moved on to the second round, once again facing Mečiar. The main factor for Gašparovič's first round success was the low turnout of the front-runner Kukan's electorate, as Kukan was generally considered to be a sure bet for the second round. In other words, the majority of the population viewed the first round as a formality, and was saving their effort for the second round to keep Mečiar at bay. Hence in the second round the (potential) Eduard Kukan voters faced an uneasy choice between two representatives of the past regime. Ultimately, Gašparovič, regarded by Mečiar opponents as the "lesser evil", was elected as the president (see Slovakia presidential election, 2004).


Ivan Gašparovič's toned down and non-confrontational approach to presidency has increased his popularity with many voters, and he is a generally popular president now. However, to date he has remained unapologetic about his role in the Mečiar's regime, which is generally perceived to have set back Slovakia's post-communist political and economic progress and development. Gašparovič is supported by the Slovak National Party[1] (SNS) an extremist nationalist party[2] led by Jan Slota and by the SMER-SD led by Robert Fico , the present prime minister.