An assassination attempt against Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico
THE RETURN to power of Robert Fico, Slovakia’s populist prime minister, has been a continuous succession of bitter conflicts ever since he was elected last September to his fourth term in office. On May 15th this took a savage turn, when an unknown assailant shot Mr Fico while he was greeting constituents in Handlova, a town 140km east of Bratislava, the capital. The attacker fired three or four shots before he was overpowered by police, according to Aktuality.sk, an independent news site. Mr Fico was rushed to hospital. That attacker was reportedly a 71-year-old from the region, but no other information has been released by police.
Mr Fico is an extraordinarily divisive figure, who previously served as prime minister from 2006 to 2010 and from 2012 to 2018. His Smer party was initially a populist left-wing outfit. But in 2018 he was forced to resign after the murder of Jan Kuciak, a journalist investigating the political activities of a prominent businessman. The murder touched off nationwide demonstrations against corruption, and led to the election of a strongly pro-EU president, Zuzana Caputova, and then to that of a reformist government. Mr Fico turned to an increasingly right-wing brand of populism to re-establish his political profile, allying himself with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, demonising immigration and vowing to end Slovakia’s support for Ukraine against Russia.
The three cabinets after Mr Fico’s were plagued by scandals of their own. In September Mr Fico won re-election, capitalising on frustration with the government’s disorganisation and lack of progress against corruption. He has since moved to turn Slovakia into a mirror of Mr Orban’s illiberal regime. In February he shut down the country’s anti-corruption authority, which he accused of pursuing politicised cases against his allies, and reduced the penalties for those accused in corruption cases (including a Smer MP and former police commissioner). He backtracked on vows to cut off Ukraine, allowing Slovakian arms suppliers to continue to sell to the country. But he has remained friendly with Russia, eliciting fury from NATO partners.
In April he put forward a law scrapping Slovakia’s independent public broadcaster, RTVS, which he accused of bias against the government, and replacing it with a new station under the government’s direct control. Many expect it to be a propaganda mouthpiece. Mr Fico’s most recent initiative is a law that would force NGOs receiving more than €5,000 ($5,400) in funds from abroad to register as foreign organisations. The law seems clearly modelled on measures that Russia and Hungary have used to hamper independent groups; a similar law has just been approved by parliament in Georgia, causing mass protests.
Until now such moves have been partially restrained by Ms Caputova, a lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner. But she elected not to run for another term as president, having received threats on her life the previous year. The presidential election on April 7th was won by Peter Pellegrini, an ally of Mr Fico. After his inauguration in June, autocratic initiatives may pass more easily. But Smer lacks a majority in parliament big enough to change the constitution, as Mr Orban has been able to do in Hungary.
Indeed, it is Mr Fico’s no-holds-barred campaigning that has been responsible for cleaving the country’s politics in two. In a short speech after the shooting, Ms Caputova called for all politicians to stop using “hateful rhetoric”. “Slovakian society is completely polarised, it is almost 50-50,” says Milan Nic, a Slovakian analyst with the German Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. In such a vicious political atmosphere, he says, assassination attempts “could happen to anybody”.■