Shortly after the shooting of Robert Fico, I received a phone call from my sister. She was extremely upset – not just about the shocking attack, but also about an incident on the bus on the way home from work in the moments after the news had broken. Two elderly fellow passengers reacted to the attempted assassination by blaming liberals and progressives in general, and in particular Michal Šimečka, an opposition politician and former vice-president of the European parliament. One passenger called for the death penalty to be reinstated and order to be restored.
At that point, the circumstances of the shooting were entirely unclear, information was partial, and it was too early to condemn or point the finger at anyone. My sister, who considers herself a liberal, spoke up to argue against the other passengers.
But when she phoned me to say she was worried about what would come next, I could feel her trembling.
Slovakia has long experience with “restoring order”. When the liberal part of the population hears these words, we think not only of the threat of Viktor Orbán-type autocracy, but of our 40 years of communist dictatorship or the wartime fascist Slovak state. But an increasingly big part of the Slovak population, fuelled by nostalgia and low expectations, is ready to embrace what such regimes promise – and in a way, I can understand why.
In the past five years, Slovakia has experienced a churn of collapsed or disgraced governments, unsolved murders, mass protests, a disastrously handled Covid pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the ensuing war next door, an influx of refugees from across the border and record inflation.
With each such event, the various tribes of opinion in our deeply divided society drift apart like broken ice floes on opposing currents. As in Poland or Hungary, there are fairly clear dividing lines: between conservative voters and liberals, between younger and older people, between those who feel part of the west as embodied by the European Union and those who look eastward, towards Russia. Some call for freedom, individual responsibility and equality; others for the strong hand of the state, the security, safety and order of an autocratic system. On one side are opposition supporters, and their leader, the young Šimečka; and on the other side is the governing coalition, with Fico at its head.
Peter Bárdy, editor-in-chief of the Slovakian news site Aktuality, wrote that “the good news is that Robert Fico’s health has stabilised. Many things depend on it.”
But I’m following discussions among friends and fellow journalists – and as they see it, whatever happens with Fico’s health, things will only get worse. Saving the prime minister’s life, his recovery, punishing the accused, shedding light on his motives – none of this will calm the escalating crisis in which Slovakia finds itself.
And the situation has indeed escalated – even before this, verbal attacks on social networks were vitriolic whether you were talking about politics or commenting on kitten pictures. Journalists and politicians alike receive death threats on a daily basis, bullets in envelopes, letters with vulgar content.
The physical attack on the prime minister was a unique act of violence, unprecedented in recent European history, and condemned by everyone across the political spectrum.
However, it is not the only recent act of political violence in Slovakia. In the 1990s, we had the assassination of witness Robert Remiáš. In 2018, the murders of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová, deaths that triggered mass protests and eventually forced Fico out of power. Two young people were gunned down outside the Tepláreň club, a venue popular with the LGBTQ+ community. There have been brutal police raids on Roma settlements. The outgoing president, Zuzana Čaputová, and her family have received death threats at her home.
A large part of Slovak society has, therefore, been living recently with the unspoken fear that the anger of some frustrated individual will turn into an act of violence. As Čaputová said: “What happened [to Fico] was an individual act, but the accumulated hatred was a collective act.”
While coalition politicians preach to people about not spreading hatred, they themselves are actively inflaming attitudes to the independent media. The influential MP and ally of Fico L’uboš Blaha, speaking just hours after the shooting, directly pinned responsibility for the attack on the liberal media, the opposition and some specific politicians. “You have made us targets,” he said. Another minister wrote on Facebook that the opposition had blood on its hands. The chairman of the governing coalition’s Slovak National party, Andrej Danko, announced legislative changes against the media on the basis that Slovakia was now on the brink of a “political war”. He asked journalists: “Are you satisfied now?” For good measure, Danko referred to my colleagues from the news organisation Denník N as “ugly pigs”. Not so long ago, Fico himself called journalists “dirty anti-Slovak prostitutes”.
The situation is not calmed by the apparent failure of the state security forces. If they could not protect the prime minister – the suspect is a 71-year-old pensioner – in a sparse crowd of supporters, can citizens trust the security forces, the information service and the police?
The paradox is that after Fico’s return to power in September 2023, almost overnight he ordered massive restructuring in the institutions of state, shut down a special prosecutor’s office and appointed people to senior positions on the basis of party affiliation.
Coalition politicians are calling for calm now but they are the ones pointing fingers and stirring up the anger of the crowd. They call for improved security, but pursue laws that threaten not only the safety of public figures, but all of us. Weakening the courts, limiting penalties for corruption, weakening democratic institutions.
Fico and his people understand politics – not as a service to citizens, but as an exercise of the feudal right to power and property. For them, the country is a fiefdom from which they must make the most for as long as they can. They are willing to change the constitution, the law, impose censorship and weaken democracy to achieve what they want.
And now, their populist, law-and-order solutions will appeal to many people, like those on the bus with my sister, demanding retribution and the death penalty.
After an assassination attempt on the prime minister, you can justify anything.
Monika Kompaníková is a Slovakian writer and editor
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