Attempted Assassination of Slovakia’s Prime Minister

Someone came very close to assassinating the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, this week. He was attending a meeting in the central Slovakian town of Handlová when he approached a small group outside to shake hands, just like politicians typically do. The shooter was part of the group and was reportedly shot five times with three of the bullets striking Fico.

This CBS report shows video of the actual incident (the footage is shocking but not gory). (1)

The report describes the suspect as “a 71-yeaqr-old former security guard and activist.” As of the most recent reports, Fico remains in serious condition. Early reports indicate that the suspect was upset over repressive measures Fico’s government was taking against independent media.

Like small states within the United States, smaller EU states typically only make the world news when some special event is going on or something awful happens. And outside the non-Russian portion of Europe, political assassinations are not routine news in Europe.

As usual, initial reports on the suspect’s politics tend to be vague, except in rare exceptions like Gavrilo Princip or Friedrich Adler.

Fico’s governing coalition is sometimes described as “left-populist,” though the “left” component seems to be pretty obscure. He began this fall a fourth (non-consecutive) term as Prime Minister in the fall of 2023.

Although he spent most of the 1990s in Strasbourg working at the European Court of Human Rights, he kept enough of a foot in domestic politics to start a successful “third-way” [neoliberal] socialist party, Smer (Direction), in 1999. It went on to dominate Slovak politics for the next quarter century. (2)

Fico’s SMER (Direction-Social Democracy) party is known left-nationalist party. But, like most European social-democratic parties in recent decades, it embraced center-left neoliberal policies, though in most cases those policies are at best more centrist than “left.” (It is a full member party of the center-left Socialist International.) As Tom Nicholson’s article points out, the comes from a tradition with less than consistently strong ties to liberal democracy. Fico himself “was even arrested in April 2022 and charged with organized crime offences, although those charges have since been dropped.”

It’s safe to say that Fico is not a “flawless democrat,” as former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder notoriously described Vladimir Putin back in 2004.

As Nicholson reports:

After winning another general election in September 2023, Fico and his cohort returned as if shot out of a cannon, gutting the leadership of the elite police unit that had charged them with crimes, spurning independent media, rewriting the criminal code to lighten punishments for corruption, and threatening to label NGOs with external funding as “foreign agents” under a Moscow-style law. [my emphasis]

His government coalition government includes the HLAS-SD (Voice-Social Democracy), a party that split off from SMER but is also considered left-nationalist, and the unabashed rightwing nationalist party SNS (Slovak National Party). The current government has pursued a foreign policy tilting toward the kind of Putin-friendly alignment of Victor Orbán’s government in Hungary, including a negative attitude toward EU support of Ukraine in the current war.

Fico is not a newcomer to such dubious political company. From 2016:

Jarosław Kaczyński, the strongman of Poland and chairman of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), even sees a danger that the refugees will impose their lifestyle on the native population in the future. What the power elites in Central and Eastern Europe – from Orbán to Kaczyński and [Polish President Andrzej] Duda to [Czech President Miloš Zeman] Zeman and Fico have in common is that - in the refugee crisis and exacerbated by the Islamist terrorist attacks, they are invoking the cement of ethnic solidarity to an extent that extends into political hysteria: Hungarians stand against "non-Hungarians", "true Poles" against "anti-Poles" and "non-Poles". The stereotype of the "anti-Czechs" is also being rediscovered [in Slovakia].

While Viktor Orbán constantly invokes the threat posed by Islamic refugees to Hungary's thousand-year-old Christian culture, Jarosław Kaczyński sees the dangers of "foreign infiltration" into everyday life. With the debate among the Eastern European elite debates, ideas are currently coming to the surface that for a long time were only used by populist politicians: the recourse to prejudices and ethnically-defined feelings of togetherness. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, for example, states that Slovakia is built "for Slovaks". His counterpart Orbán, like PiS leader Kaczyński, even invokes the decline of nation states and European culture due to epidemics: "There are risks of infection and masses of immigrants who are unwilling and are becoming more and more aggressive. [my emphasis] (3)

The four rightwing governments of Poland, the Czech Republica, Slovakia, and Hungary formed a cooperating group called the Visegrád Group, founded in 1991. Robert Beck noted in February, “As 2024 began, the Visegrád 4 (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) was totally bereft of consensus on the most important European security challenge of the past eighty years,” i.e., the Russo-Ukraine War. (4)

Of course, there are various speculations and even deliberately misleading reports circulating around the assassination attempt. The Brussels-based news organization Euroactiv reports:

On the one hand, Slovakian accounts were pushing false facts about the assailant’s political affiliations, painting him as an extreme liberal who wanted to take down Fico, widely considered a populist. On the other hand, international accounts tried to connect the assassination attempt with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the World Health Organization. …

The domestic disinformation was in line with the existing landscape that the government has pushed until today, said Pavol Hardos, assistant professor at Comenius University in Bratislava and member of the Konspiratori.sk project, a public database of Czech and Slovak disinformation websites. The disinformation apparatus has worked to connect the shooter with Fico’s opposition and specifically the Progressive Slovakia party, said Hardos.

“The disinformation is mostly about painting the domestic opposition and civil sector and the media as the ones who are responsible or directly connected to the shooter,” said Hardos. The assistant professor pointed out an earlier rumor that the assailant was Ukrainian, which was quickly debunked once police identified him. (5)

(No word yet on whether Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Hamas, Lee Harvey Oswald, or Bigfoot were involved in this incident. Reporters should ask RFK, Jr. for his take on it.)

Notes:

(1) Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico shot in assassination attempt. CBS Evening News YouTube channel 05/16/2024. <https://youtu.be/QhOc8phbeRI?si=qNs9kAilEhoDtsrM> (Accessed: 2024-18-05).

(2) Nicholson, Tom (2024): Roots of Robert Fico’s shooting lie in Slovakia’s bitter divides. Politico EU 05/15/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/prime-minister-robert-fico-shooting-attempted-assassination-slovakia-divisions/> (Accessed: 2024-18-05).

(3) Fehr, Helmut (2016): In geschlossener Gesellschaft: Ostmitteleuropa und die Rückkehr des Autoritären. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 1:2016, 77. My translation from German.

(4) Beck, Robert (2024): The Visegrád Four: Disunity in Central Europe. Foreign Policy Research Institute 02/23/2024. <https://www.fpri.org/article/2024/02/the-visegrad-four-disunity-in-central-europe/> (Accessed: 2024-18-05).

(5) Gkritsi, Elizy (2024): Multiple disinformation narratives spreading around the Fico assassination attempt. Euroactiv 05/17/2024. <https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/multiple-disinformation-narratives-spreading-around-the-fico-assassination-attempt/> (Accessed: 2024-18-05).