Slovakia is in a state of shock after the country’s head of government, Prime Minister Robert Fico, was shot multiple times during a public appearance on May 15.
The attack caused widespread dismay across the country and was condemned by allies and opponents alike. “The hateful rhetoric we witness in society leads to hateful acts,” said the country’s President Zuzana Čaputová. “Please, let’s stop it.” Western leaders joined the chorus. Even Vladimir Putin described it as a “heinous crime”.
There was anger too. Slovakia’s interior minister immediately characterized the attack as an assassination attempt. Other allies of the prime minister launched a welter of invective aimed at journalists and the opposition.
A senior MP for Fico’s Smer party who is also a deputy speaker of parliament, Ľuboš Blaha, accused Fico’s critics of stoking hatred: “You, the liberal media, the political opposition, what kind of hatred did you spread towards Robert Fico? You built the gallows for him.”
This statement and a flow of similar sentiments from Fico’s allies in the hours after the shooting echoed a core element of Fico’s political strategy, which involves a long-running demonization of the mainstream media and his political opponents.
He has condemned journalists, variously, as “pigs”, “hyenas”, “snakes”, “toilet spiders” and “dirty anti-Slovak prostitutes.” His government is currently proposing a law that would dismantle the public broadcaster, RTVS, and replace it with a government-controlled state media outfit.
Andrej Danko, leader of the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS) and a key governing partner of Fico’s, warned that “a political war is beginning” and declared: “There will be changes. Changes to the media . . . I guarantee you that I will not hesitate anymore.” He did not elaborate.
Pro-Russian social media accounts alleged that the suspect was a member of Progressive Slovakia, the largest opposition party, but the claim was quickly refuted.
In fact, public figures in Slovakia, including opposition party leaders and senior news editors, uniformly expressed their horror at the attack, denounced political violence, and conveyed their sympathy to Fico, wishing him a full recovery.
Fico has served as Slovakia’s prime minister – the country’s most powerful office – for more than 10 of the last 20 years and was most recently re-elected to government in September.
On May 15, the prime minister was visiting Handlová, a small mining town in western Slovakia, for a government meeting. As he approached a small group of people gathered in the street outside the meeting venue, an elderly man in the crowd drew a pistol and fired it toward him five times.
The interior minister later said that three bullets had struck the premier. Fico was flown to a hospital in the nearby city of Banská Bystrica, where he underwent five hours of surgery.
Reports about the exact nature of his injuries were confused: it was initially reported that he had been struck in the head, but Robert Kaliňák, Fico’s defense minister and one of his closest party allies, later spoke about wounds to the stomach and one of his joints.
Cellphone video footage and local TV images that emerged in the hours after the shooting did not show clearly what happened: after shots rang out, he could be seen falling backward over a park bench as his security detail swarmed towards the suspected shooter. He was later bundled into a limousine amid chaotic scenes.
Kaliňák, addressing a media conference at the hospital on the evening of the shooting, described Fico’s condition as “extraordinarily serious”; Tomáš Taraba, a deputy prime minister speaking to BBC radio at around the same time, seemed less alarmed, saying he expected Fico to survive.
As of late May 16, Fico remained in the hospital, in a serious but stable condition.
The presumed shooter was quickly disarmed and detained by police. He was later identified by police and local media as a 71-year-old former security guard from Levice, another town in western Slovakia that is about an hour’s drive from Handlová. On May 16, he was charged with attempted murder and other offenses.
The attacker’s motive was unclear. He was a member of a literary association generally regarded as left-wing, but is also reported to have been involved in a now-dissolved pro-Russian militia, Slovenskí Branci (Slovak Conscripts.) He had reportedly been the victim of a violent assault himself in recent years.
As in most Central European countries, gun violence in Slovakia is rare, especially against politicians. When it does occur, it can have far-reaching political consequences.
In 2022, a right-wing extremist attacked a gay bar in the capital, Bratislava, shooting dead two patrons and injuring a waitress. He was later found dead, apparently by suicide. Prosecutors concluded that he had originally planned to target the then-prime minister, Eduard Heger, but had been deterred by security measures around the premier.
Investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner Martina Kušnírová were shot dead in their home in a village in western Slovakia in February 2018. The subsequent investigation revealed evidence of high-level corruption connecting criminals, the judiciary, the police, influential businesspeople, and Fico’s then-government. He and Kaliňák, who was then interior minister, were both forced to step down in spring 2018 in the wake of public outrage over the killings.
In 2010, Ernest Valko, a politically connected lawyer and former top official of the pre-1993 Czechoslovak constitutional court, was murdered in his home near Bratislava. Ten years later, prosecutors ascribed the killing to a bungled robbery, but the details of the case have still to be clarified.
Political polarization in Slovakia has risen dramatically since the murders of Kuciak and Kušnírová, heightening during the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Not least, this has been because Fico himself, along with his political allies, has chosen to exploit conspiracy narratives to fuel his return to power.
Formerly a relatively uncontroversial NATO and EU leader, Fico has, since 2018, accused the US of fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, denounced Slovakia’s liberal President Čaputová as a foreign agent, and promoted Covid vaccine conspiracy theories.
(His ardent distrust of the US is shared by Blaha, a key political ally, who recently appeared on Russia’s English-language state propaganda channel RT to assert that it was “no coincidence” that a key US package of military aid for Ukraine had been approved on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, something he attributed to “American liberal circles.”)
Soon after the 2018 murders, while he was still prime minister, Fico began suggesting that the huge public protests of the time were being orchestrated by Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor, investor, and philanthropist George Soros, a favorite bogeyman of the anti-Semitic far-right.
He has continued to vilify Soros, and has been echoed by Slovakia’s thriving ecosystem of disinformation websites, ever since. This tactic appears to have worked: a recent poll suggested that almost half of Slovaks now believe Soros is trying to control the government.
On May 16, a short video clip of the suspect, apparently taken while he was in custody, appeared to show him expressing negative sentiments towards the government. It was presumably taken by a police officer and was quickly pounced on by anti-opposition accounts.
Such leaks, along with the rapid politicization of the attack, suggest calls for calm will struggle to gain traction. Some passersby in Handlová, where Fico and his party enjoy broad support, immediately harangued journalists for covering the shooting. Slovak newsrooms have since received warnings from police, citing a perceived threat, to review the location and visibility of their reporters.
James Thomson is a columnist for The Slovak Spectator, the Bratislava-based English-language newspaper and website.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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