Where Slovaks Dare: Populist Ministers, Assassin Poets & A Slovak Civil War (!?)
Welcome to a Černobog's Shadow Edition of Feuilleton Friday!
“Indeed, it is a heartbreaking spectacle to look upon, this [Greater Slavic] nation, the most numerous in all of Europe, shattered, divided; as in its atomisation it groans…Everywhere she is dragged in triumph, bound to the chariot of foreigners. She toils to raise comfortable constructions for others, receiving in return nothing but the abasement poured upon her, the disgrace hurled at her; O, what a sorrow to behold…”
- Ľudovít Štúr
Part 1: Six Months In Slovakia
In 2018, I lived six interesting months of my life in Slovakia. While in some ways it was antithetical to the course of my life, it was also a creative period: I wrote several collections’ worth of what, I believe, will be considered my best pre-covid era poetry. (I will begin self-publishing these collections soon) I conceived of my first dystopian novel, which I hope to complete and self-publish in the next year and a half under a pseudonym. And many others projects besides.
Perhaps I should do more things that are antithetical to my life? Something to think about.
While I haven’t visited as much as I would like since then, Slovakia has become, and will always remain, a special country. Amplified atmospherically by it being one of the core countries of the “spooky” Carpathian Mountains that were home to Vlad the Impaler (in today’s Romania) and the bloody Countess Bathory (in today’s Slovakia).
In addition to all the above, I bore witness to what, for me, was the closest act of world history to my life after the Bataclan attack in Paris and, of course, the covid lockdowns: the repercussions following the murder of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, on February 21, 2018 in the West Slovak village of Veľká Mača.
Kuciak had gained prominence as an investigative journalist, and a brave one too: his focus was on connections between Slovak politicians and the mafia, as well as investigations into tax fraud. In other words, he went after the biggest fish.
The biggest fish then decided to strike back. But how and why they did and could requires a bit of context. For this reason this’ll be a long “feuilleton.” But keep reading. It’s not every day you hear about Slovakia in the Anglosphere.
(For anyone from Slovakia reading this, I’m keeping this objective for the purpose of informing Anglosphere readers. Not to offend any one side or make things worse. I appreciate your understanding.)
For those unfamiliar with Slovak history, the 1990s were tough times for the newly-independent country. Its first leader, Vladimír Mečiar, defined the era; while Mečiar can be credited for achieving Slovak independence through his negotiations with Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, the Mečiar era is symbolic of autocratic rule and criminality. In particular, that of the mafia who found Bratislava a cozy place to be. For this reason, the term Mečiarizmus is often used to refer to that era and its baggage unflatteringly. Politicos might remember Madeleine Albright calling Slovakia “the black hole of Europe” around that time. A statement movies like Eurotrip and Hostel would later take advantage of, much to the ire of the Slovaks.
Suffice to say that unlike Józef Piłsudski in Poland and T.G. Masaryk for the Czechs, Mečiar isn’t bound to go down in history as a revered Founding Father anytime soon.
Literati interested in this epoch will find no better novel to explore the Slovakia of the Mečiarizmus era than Peter Pišťanek’s River of Babylon trilogy. It also has honest - if gritty and perverted - observations about the end of Communism and the transition into a post-Soviet country. Although I warn you: it is gloriously (but not needlessly) politically incorrect. It is not at all a novel for polite society. But those who are brave enough to read it will get an unforgettable picture of just how Communism turned the societies it captured into low common denominator societies with low common denominator reasons for living. (Something that, unfortunately, American consumer society shares in common with Marxism-Leninism) A lot of people simply cannot fathom that this is what Communism does. Another Slovak author, Balla, is among the best at depicting what can be called the post-Communist “emptiness” of life and society. More on that in a future post since Balla is an author who should absolutely be on your reading list.
Suffice to say: it came as a huge surprise when Slovakia underwent enough changes post-Mečiar to catch up with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. And on time for Slovakia to join the EU with the rest of the Visegrad (V4) countries in 2004.
Even so, the policies of the Mečiar era meant that in the context of the V4 countries Slovakia had its own destiny to follow. Mečiar was opposed to the shock therapy then being applied across the former Eastern bloc, such as the Balcerowicz Plan in Poland and a similar one proposed by Klaus in the Czech Republic. Slovakia, as a result of this and other differentials, has had a very different economic flavor and one with curiously acute contrasts: while Slovakia is not a rich country, Bratislava (last I checked) has the third highest PPP (purchasing power parity) in the EU, after Luxembourg City and Hamburg, Germany. Amusingly to Czechs and Slovaks alike, Bratislava is more expensive today than Prague. (Though heavy inflation in the Czech lands right now might have changed that)
In regards to the EU, Slovakia had more of a middle-ground approach. It generally shares the conservative values of Poland and Hungary (in its own way). But unlike those countries - and the Czech Republic in the beginning - it refrained from antagonism by, for instance, accepting 12 refugees during the migrant crisis instead of rejecting them outright. For that reason, Slovakia has kept a low profile during the 2010s and escaped the vilification campaign by Brussels to depict Poland and Hungary as the most evil countries that ever walked the earth.
At least until now. More on that in a bit.
Slovakia also became - and remains - the only V4 country to adopt the Euro, doing so in 2009. The Slovak koruna was regarded as a weak currency and didn’t have the national venerability (and, therefore, popular attachment) of its counterparts in Poland, Czech and Hungary. How Slovaks feel about the Euro would require its own post: but unless something has changed recently, it hasn’t been as negatively received as in other countries. Unlike other countries that gave up strong and healthy currencies to adopt the Euro, Slovakia didn’t feel like it made any such sacrifice.
I go through this history because: in addition to being the vile act that it was, Jan Kuciak’s murder also brought back memories of Mečiarizmus to a people who believed that the mafia of the 90s, while not quite a distant memory, was nonetheless on the road to becoming one. (Since Godfather-loving Americans don’t get this, I have to state that in Italy as well as Slovakia, people find mafia romanticization disgusting) To say that the Slovaks were pissed is putting it mildly. Not a people known for mass protests, the spring of 2018 was an exception. Everyone I encountered everywhere I went was visibly and unquestionably angry. And they went to the streets to show it.
Coming from a country where fake and poser emotions on TV have been the norm for so long, with respect to the souls of Kuciak and his fiancée there was something honest and even refreshing about being in Slovakia at that time. The anger was honest, unadulterated and - dare I say it - genuinely righteous. Jesus Christ taught his disciples - and us in turn - to “judge with righteous judgment.” (John 7:24) For the first and last time in my life I felt like an entire society was doing just that; in contrast to the occasional Lot we encounter in our Sodom & Gomorrah 2.0 society.
The Prime Minister at the time was Robert Fico, the very same politician who was shot last month. Kuciak’s investigations included members of his SMER Party; this put Fico in difficult-to-navigate hot water when Kuciak’s corpse grew cold. Understandably so: this had happened under Fico’s watch, and if he himself had nothing to do with the murder directly the closeness of Kuciak’s criticisms suggested Fico, at the least, knew something and/or wanted him silenced.
After trying to handle the situation, Fico eventually resigned almost a month later on the condition that his replacement was a SMER Party member. Peter Pellegrini - whose Italian grandfather’s surname was an unfortunate coincidence given the memories of mafia connections - took over as Prime Minister.
The investigation later found the murder to have been arranged by associates of a Slovak businessman named Marian Kočner. From a legal perspective, Kočner’s guilt has not been fully determined. But associates of Kočner who admitted their guilt now serve lengthy prison sentences and I doubt most Slovaks believe Kočner’s pleading of not guilty. (Unless they have a different theory) The investigation continues. But it doesn’t feel like Kuciak’s soul and that of his fiancée have been put to rest in any meaningful sense of the term. The fact that anyone was charged at all has led some in Slovakia to call it a “minor miracle.”
2018 was a harbinger moment in Slovak public consciousness. As Balkan Insight explained:
The killings of Kuciak and his architect fiancée Martina Kušnírová confirmed many people’s worst fears about the existence in Slovakia of a web of organised crime, oligarch power and political mafia that had enmeshed every corner of the country.
“All the mud is coming to the surface,” says Michal Vasecka, sociologist at the Bratislava Policy Institute. “I would compare it to a state when addicts go through a withdrawal phase: it’s very uncomfortable, but we have to face it head on.”
During the last months of my time in Slovakia, my impression was that while Pellegrini had a chance of rescuing SMER - and to his credit, he did - Fico’s days as a politician were over. If he was guilty, then nothing need be said. If he was not guilty, he was still the sacrifice that needed to be made in the likely event justice would not be served. In other words, Fico was Slovak society’s collateral: insurance to make sure the actual debt of justice was paid. It was both personal and not personal at the same time.
I left the shadows of the Carpathian mountains soon afterward. But Slovakia had become a part of my metaphysical makeup. And when the Slovaks surprised me by re-electing Robert Fico as PM in October 2023, it almost felt as personal as if I had stayed.
Either way, it was a huge surprise.
Part 2: Who Is Robert Fico? (1989-2018)
While being in Slovakia at this time left me with a less-than-favorable impression of Robert Fico, I don’t think that bias is still valid at this time. Fico is now back for a third term, meaning that enough Slovaks found it in themselves to look past the events of 2018 or at least Fico’s purported role in them. On top of that Fico’s friend Pellegrini was elected as president shortly afterward when the previous president, Zuzana Čaputová, decided not to run again.
Obviously, things have changed in Slovakia since I was there.
Hailing from the West Slovak town of Topoľčany, Fico, born in 1964, came from a working-class family; his father operated a forklift while his mother sold shoes. While the early parts of his career were defined by Communist-style atheism, Fico would later reveal in 2014 that his Catholic grandfather, a man true to the Christian lifestyle, had left a strong mark on him; and that in fact he, Fico, was a Catholic and not an atheist. But little is known of his private life and, by default, his religious life. And some believe this to be a lie based upon the incompatibility of Christian rites with Communist Party membership. Either it was a lie, or Fico succeeded at being confirmed and taking the eucharist in secret. I will only say that I hope he has found God because as a sinner he desperately needs Him.
Aspiring for a career in law, Fico graduated from Comenius University in Bratislava with a specialization in criminal law. Ironic? I’ll let you decide. In any case, he impressed his professors at the time, with one describing him as "ambitious, very confident and very involved in discussions."1 During that time, he also worked as a military investigator.
From then until 2002, Fico studied criminal law and spent time abroad in London. By that year, he became an associate professor. In the meantime, his ambitions in politics began. A Communist Party member at first, the Velvet Revolution saw him join a successor party fittingly called The Party of the Democratic Left. (SDĽ) He rose to prominence, beginning as a member of parliament in 1992 in the waning days of Czechoslovakia.
The 1990s saw his political star rise as his criminal law star fall. The Slovak government sent him to the European Court of Human Rights as a legal counselor. However, all fourteen cases he was involved in failed. One can’t help but wonder if his time at the ECHR - now known as a politicized, pro-EU organization - influenced his views of the political landscape in a way that led to him becoming a “populist.” In any case, there is little in his early career to indicate that Fico was a likely populist candidate in the PiS/Orban mold. Except, possibly, his working-class background and “secret” Catholicism.
Once Vladimír Mečiar left power in 1998, Fico had become the most popular candidate among his fellow party members. But his ambitions couldn’t save the party. Following a defeat he left the SDĽ that same year. With three other associates, Fico founded SMER, or Direction-Social Democracy. (This around the same time that today’s prominent parties in Poland were also founded) Soon, SMER became the primary leftist party in Slovakia. Even so, Fico - though a party member in the past - recognized that the collapse of the SDĽ had a lot to do with its former Communist apparatchiks. He instituted a “clean hands policy” to keep ex-Commies (as in ex-Communist politicians) from joining. Turning SMER into a post-Communist leftist party.
Political landscapes are not evenly divided in Slovakia the way they are in the US or even in some other Western European countries; at least they weren’t before, though maybe that has changed now. This became apparent once Fico became Prime Minister of Slovakia for the first time, in 2006, after running a successful campaign against failed austerity policies in the healthcare and education sectors. Upon his victory, he formed a coalition with Mečiar’s party and the SNS, a right-wing party. The SNS was a party that, so to say, was lovingly inclined to make negative comments about the Gypsies (there are many in Slovakia) and Hungarians (with whom the Slovaks have bad blood and who also form a minority large enough to not be dismissed). While leading the leftist opposition, Fico tolerated this. In any case, as Czech news outlet Seznam Zpravy has reported: “most Slovaks decide on their vote only a week before the election,” according to Slovak sociologists. If true, hardcore party tribalism is either not as big of a thing in Slovakia as in other countries; or Slovak political tribalism isn’t an automatic indicator of one’s voting preferences.2 From my limited experience, I would say both are true to varying degrees. In 2018 I didn’t encounter the kind of tribalism that’s all over the place today in the US.
How Slovaks reconcile this is a question best reserved for a Slovak Studies expert. In my opinion, however, the Slovaks simply don’t divide in the left-right manner by which others can so easily break apart. At least when it comes to heritage. Nationalism is a normal point of view in Slovakia and the Slovaks have a strong folk culture and, like every good Slavic culture, a pantheon of much-loved heroes. But Slovaks don’t have a “bourgeois” history: they descend from peasants, farmers and miners - almost all the nobility in Slovakia, historically, was Hungarian. For this reason, left-wing ideas that appeal to the working class and the poor have a natural resonance and do not contradict, for instance, faith in God. For us in the Anglosphere removed from “a faraway country of which we know little,” Ireland is perhaps the closest comparative example.
There isn’t much I can add about Fico’s domestic policy. Tabletop issues were just that: tabletop issues. By European standards - and certainly by those of the V4 countries - there was nothing altogether radical about Fico’s first two terms in the greater sense. An exception is 2010, when truckers in Slovakia revolted against the substandard implementation of freeway tolls. Initially resistant, Fico capitulated to the truckers and resolved the issue. And that was that.
His personal life was a different story. Though married, Fico has been known to have one or two mistresses and affairs that have not always been completely separate from governmental functions and government money. This caught up with him in 2018 when one mistress, whom he had made his secretary, had to be let off when public opinion toward her (as a way of directing it against Fico) got especially nasty.
I imagine many Slovaks will strongly disagree with me. But if Fico deserves criticism for anything, it is this; before one leads a country, one’s personal life should be straight before overseeing the lives of others. If he is indeed a Roman Catholic as he claims, a long chat with God outside the Pearly Gates awaits him. I have met Slovaks who view Catholics in their country as nothing but hypocrites. Fico’s shenanigans no doubt amplify this feeling and do damage to the spiritual health of the nation. Of course he is not a priest; but he is a leader all the same.
Part 3: Fico’s Foreign Policy
With all that said: it is only his personal love life that can in any way be called “colorful.” As a politician Fico (to foreign observers) comes off as a guy who simply does his job, on one hand; and who, on the other hand, stands out by virtue of his experience, which even his haters have to admit is considerable. Until 2018, Fico appears to have known how not to rock the boat in Brussels and at home; and when that couldn’t be avoided, he was able to set the boat right. There is little difference between him and a grimy Dutch captain of a ship who has wives in several ports but knows how to keep a boat afloat in stormy seas.
In the meantime, his position as a leftist with nationalist sympathies had, I imagine, satiated the tribalists to some degree. Though I’m happy to defer to the Slovaks in that case; perhaps it is not that simple.
Despite the above traits, however, he has not been able to free the Slovaks of the general pessimism that the best they can do is elect idiots. And like his mistresses, this too is on him. I will leave it up to the biographers to determine whether Fico is, in fact, an idiot. But this inability to change a kind of national depression is important when it comes to understanding his 2018 fall from grace. Slovaks need a leader to give them more than just a functioning administrative machine; they need hope.
It would be unbecoming of me to not reference Fico’s foreign policy. Regarding the EU, Fico’s approach is best summarized as a pragmatic pro-EU perspective. To him, the EU is politics as usual; this in contrast to the idealism out West that has been proselytized throughout the former Eastern bloc for the last ten or so years, where the EU must be regarded as a sort of Holy Roman Empire with a stress on the word “holy.”
Fico has agreed with the EU on some things: joining the Eurozone, for instance. He also was disapproving of Brexit, believing the British didn’t know what they wanted. But he also disagreed with Brussels and its neighbors on a few issues, such as the status of Kosovo (anti-Kosovo independence) and the Euromaidan protests (considered an internal Ukrainian affair). There is evidence to show that the EU’s disproportionate interest in the 2014 Euromaidan protests that toppled the government of Putin ally Viktor Yanukovich must have had a formative role to play in Fico’s eventual friendship with Viktor Orban. Like Hungary, Slovakia also shares a border with Ukraine. What happens in Ukraine is a lot closer to home for Hungarians and Slovaks (and, of course, Poles) than Americans or other Westerners. Fico also welcomed (albeit casually) the election of Donald Trump, seeing his presidency as an opportunity to bolster more military spending in the EU. He wasn’t wrong.
Regarding Russia, Fico’s traditional policy has been to restore relations with Russia as a form of “Slavonic solidarity.” This would make Fico one of the few politicians left in Greater Slavia who is explicitly influenced by Slavophilic ideas; of course it is worth noting that Slovakia’s greatest intellectual, Ľudovít Štúr, was one of the great non-Russian Slavophiles of the 19th century. But like every issue, Fico has been as nonchalant about Russia as with every other issue. He criticized Russia every time they invaded another country: in 2008 over Georgia, and 2022 over Ukraine. While sympathetic to working with Russia, Fico does not have a history of being a pro-Putin sycophant. Unless someone has evidence to the contrary.
Where Fico differs with the EU is not on issues of morality but what the Russo-Ukrainian War represents, how to resolve it and the effects it will have on the nation. Fico argued, for instance, that sanctions against Russia wouldn’t harm the regime and only harm ordinary people; a fact that was proven right when Russia, far from wasting away economically, sold its oil elsewhere and saw the ruble climb to an all-time high. The oligarchs did just fine as ordinary Russians, caught off from SWIFT and other international accoutrements, had to go through a lot of hassles just to get by.
In general, Fico is also skeptical about Ukraine and NATO’s approach to the war as conducive to resolving fundamental issues in the region. This is a healthy perspective to have; after all, most outsiders know nothing about Slavic people and their affairs. In many instances, they’re proud of their ignorance. And before 2022, virtually the entirety of the Anglosphere was ignorant of Ukraine. Leading a country that many Westerners confuse with Slovenia and pair with a tactless guffaw, I’m sure Fico understands this all too well.
Part 4: From Gunfire to Gunfire (2018-Present)
Circling back to 2018: Fico became “lost in the political wilderness,” as local and regional media phrased it. During this time, criminal trials were launched against Fico and other members of SMER related to an array of corruption-related charges. Given that some have whispered about a civil war in Slovakia (!) I can only speculate that these trials - and the accompanying party-to-party vitriol, compounded by greater issues in the world - did a lot to seriously amplify partisan tendencies.
Fico’s fall from grace in 2018 meant that the opposition, once in power, started on a relatively optimistic mandate. After Pellegrini completed Fico’s remaining term, a populist named Igor Matovič was elected in 2020. He didn’t last long, however. While what I call the “covid curse” might have something to do with it - I refer here to the inevitable political defeat of every party and/or politician who was in power in 2020, during the covid lockdowns - Matovič is regarded as having been the catalyst for Slovakia’s subsequent degeneration into civil division. As Balkan Insight explained:
"Matovič has started to transform the anger of the society into a class war: city vs. countryside, educated vs. uneducated, common people vs. the elites. And he adds hate into the mix…"3
Already in 2018, I had discovered that the rest of Slovakia’s dislike of Bratislava was stronger than other countries have toward their capital cities; one time I even met a pretty young lady (from Fico’s hometown, coincidentally) who had been studying at Bratislava’s Comenius University for a year, but transferred to Košice’s Pavol Jozef Šafárik University not because her degree required it; but simply because she didn’t like Bratislava people. Much as other Czechs don’t like Prague and other Poles don’t like Warsaw, I have yet to hear a story quite like that from these countries.
If the situation is worse than that stunning example, the situation must indeed be very bad post-Matovič. Today, he is the most distrusted politician in the entire country. (a whopping 91% of the country distrusts him) This is logical: Slovaks had high hopes for change after 2018 and Matovič proved to be the exact opposite. He will probably go down in history as a kind of Slovak Tony Blair, sans the immigration and multiculturalism angle.
Given the antagonism, it is not surprising that Matovič’s plagiarized Masters thesis was discovered sooner rather than later. Shit truly hit the fan when Matovič purchased doses of Russia’s covid vaccine, Sputnik V. Either the Slovaks were not feeling very pro-Russian at that moment, or their pro-Russian sympathies did not extend to possessing the desire to inject an internationally condemned vaccination into their bodies. Whatever the reason, it was the end of the road for Matovič.
His finance minister, Eduard Heger, replaced him - pro-EU and a member of the charismatic Catholic movement. Heger might have managed to keep a lid on the situation if not for the Ukraine War and all that came after it. His government was obliged to resign after a vote of no confidence following a period of large-scale support for Ukraine which coincided with the post-invasion energy crisis, housing crisis and high levels of inflation.
In the meantime, newly elected President Zuzana Čaputová - a local ecological hero who successfully won a battle back in the day to get rid of a toxic landfill close to her hometown - helped give Slovakia a more liberal image abroad and, from 2020-2021 at least, briefly enabled the government to regain some of the public’s trust. Even in the Czech Republic, Čaputová had a higher approval rating than Czech president Miloš Zeman. But as the Ukraine War became more and more unpopular, the pro-EU Čaputová also began to be affected. No politician was immune to the combined and compounded effects of serious global issues upon a country that small.
After appointing a technocrat named Ľudovít Ódor to oversee the rest of Hegers term following his no-confidence vote, Čaputová herself decided not to run for another term due to the overwhelming burden caused by the combination of the covid lockdowns and their repercussions as well as the Ukraine War, the energy crisis and the repercussions of inflation.
To put it simply: the pro-EU liberals who might have taken Slovakia in a different direction were burned out by the combined and compounded effects of the covid/Ukraine War era along with the energy crisis, repercussions and expectations caused by Jan Kuciak’s murder and Matovič’s pouring of fuel on the fire. From a simple perspective: the CCP, Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden’s shenanigans had a knock-on effect that stunned Slovakia to where, like a cartoon character, it saw stars spinning around its head.
All of this paved the way for Robert Fico’s glorious return.
Part 5: Robert Fico 3.0 & Civil War?
When Fico was under fire in 2018, he made a feeble attempt to blame what had happened on George Soros. To be sure, Soros does finance left-wing, open borders movements and it’s not difficult to find the evidence for that. It has also been revealed that Soros pumped around $10 million into the coffers of left-wing, anti-PiS activists in Poland to try and remove them from power. It is not antisemitic to point this out. And I’m still waiting for the day when defenders of democracy will condemn Soros for using his billionaire power to affect political change in countries that have nothing to do with him. I guess it’s more safe, servile and conformist to blame everything on Elon Musk.
But in Fico’s case it was completely unconvincing and only made his situation worse. I suspect someone must have told him that afterward because the formerly “mainstream” Prime Minister returned to power with a more populist angle than before. The European Conservative referred to him recently as a ‘sovereigntist:’ given his past policies, I think this label is a lot more accurate than ‘populist’ even. Although as far as association is concerned, the ‘populist’ title probably cannot be removed by now.
Fico might have seen ingratiating himself with the greater populist movement as a way of gaining more international allies. But while his path toward the populist movement is less conventional than that of Viktor Orban or the PiS Party in Poland - Orban and many in PiS having been anti-Communist dissidents while Fico had been a Party member - many of his past policies - aversion to the migrant crisis, certain socially conservative values, the desire for a normal relationship with Russia - suggest that common ground with Orban at the least was not just logical, but inevitable.
It was also logical to expect that the pro-Russia segment of Slovak society, initially quiet during the early period of the war, would only stay quiet for so long. Especially as the pro-EU government of Heger began to struggle under the strain. Along with 2024 being a different time than the 2010s, it is clear that the War in Ukraine had a role in bringing Orban and Fico together, even if they run countries that even today must still have bad blood toward each other.
A quick note on the pro-Russia Slovaks and why I don’t criticize them. As historian of Slovakia Stanislav Kirschenbaum explained, the Slovaks don’t have a history of egregious wrongs committed by Russia to feel anti-Russian about. In Poland, the Poles have every reason to dislike Russians and be suspicious about them: Russia has done terrible things to the Polish people. The Slovaks don’t have that history and in the case of 1945, many felt they had genuinely been liberated by the Soviet Union from the Tiso regime. That is why Communist-era monuments to Red Army soldiers weren’t taken down in Slovakia. People need to understand that their hatred of Russia isn’t an infectious disease. If the West wants Slovaks to hate Russians as much as they do, they need to give Slovaks a reason to do so. But I digress.
When Fico returned to power in 2023, one of the first things he initiated were changes to the Slovak judiciary and a reform of the public news outlet. Policies that appear to be clearly inspired by Poland’s PiS Party as well as current PM Donald Tusk’s plan to liquidate the public media in a manner that disregards the rule of law. (To put it in EU language) Tusk’s actions have quietly caused a knock-on effect in the region where either radical leftists see an opportunity to do the same “in the name of democracy” or those who are EU-skeptic (like Fico) are learning the opposite lesson. I will write a feuilleton about that next week.
Of course there is a big difference between Tusk and Fico: because Tusk is an EU-bootlicker who “saved democracy” in Poland - whatever that means - Brussels has no problem turning a blind eye and pretending nothing happened. But when Fico’s doing it, the sky is going to fall because democracy can’t be democracy, apparently, if the party you don’t like wins.
Now we have a bizarre situation in Brussels: Eurocrats are afraid of little Slovakia? It’s hard not to laugh at how insecure EU leftists have become. When Kaczynski in Poland accuses Tusk of wanting to help Russia by making Poles into idiots who freak out and whose weakness invites eventual Russian conquest, (my phrasing here) I can’t help but agree when looking at Brussels.
Despite winning the election - “saving democracy,” anyone? - it did not take long for anti-Fico protesters to take to the streets in scenes reminiscent of late 2016 when, in reaction to Donald Trump’s victory, Antifa lunatics stormed the streets and caused a slew of damage in the US. The news has reported that Fico intends to dismantle safeguards that prevented his corruption networks from flourishing. I can’t comment on the truth of that without more information since a recent strategy of leftist reporting on the region is to regurgitate their “truths” in the most objective light possible and repeat them in article after article to try and frame worldviews in their favor.
In the recent presidential election, Fico’s ally Peter Pellegrini won with 53% of the vote while his opponent, pro-EU Ivan Korcok, won 47%. Percentages which give a little bit of sense to the size of the two divided segments of Slovak society. Though Pellegrini hasn’t assumed the presidency yet, once he does all major government organs will be administrated by SMER.
Part 6: The Assassination
It is these events that caused an aging poet named Juraj Cintula to try and assassinate the Prime Minister. This he did on May 15, 2024 while Fico gave a speech in the mining town of Handlova. The Prime Minister was brought to a hospital in the Central Slovak city of Banska Bystrica and apparently escaped death by a hairs breadth. He is currently recovering in Bratislava. Fico will live to see another day. But will his career?
Almost all politicians in Slovakia and elsewhere in the world - including the opposition - condemned the shooting. But it appears to have ruffled the feathers of Fico’s allies considerably and taken some of the wind out of the opposition. And understandably so: for those who are conservative or on the right (and I mean normal people here, not unsavory types), holding those values in this day and age is synonymous with receiving an unending and even enthusiastically welcomed torrent of hate. Much of it unhinged, a lot of it based on ignorance or tribalistic narrow-mindedness: but all of it very, very real. They point out that this assassination might have never happened if not for vitriolic anti-Fico narratives.
The assassin has a strange history. On one hand, he was a part of a pro-Russian organization. But following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he became vehemently anti-Russian. Cintula also reportedly founded a group called Movement Against Violence. (I know, I’m still laughing) When Fico was re-elected, Cintula became an activist. As Cintula had worked for a time as a security guard, he owned his firearm legally. On the whole, Cintula has given off the vibe of someone who is either paradoxical or switches extremes easily; that due to either personal idiosyncracy or gullibility that leads to easy manipulation.
Cintula has said that he did what he did out of disagreement with the government’s policies. Cintula is reportedly proud of the attempted murder, suggesting that any moral compass he might have once owned had broken a long time ago. He has since said he wanted to harm Fico enough to remove him from power without killing him. Given that he unloaded five bullets into the Prime Minister - including one at the stomach - such a claim is utterly laughable. But that’s the nature of our times.
So far, it seems that Cintula was acting on his own accord. But while many in Slovakia would have their own “domestic” reasons for wanting Fico dead - and there are definitely some who now view Cintula as a hero - Brussels would have unquestionably been a major beneficiary. It is one thing to be a populist and another to be an experienced populist. Even so, the shooting was bad timing for Brussels: this close to the EU elections, the assassination is bound to influence many people’s votes in ways previously unanticipated. Given Cintula’s idiosyncracies, it is likely that as a sensitive authorial soul he allowed himself to get easily radicalized and convinced himself that committing murder was a noble cause. One can’t help but think of an old man version of Gavrilo Princip.
The paranoia Brussels has toward the results of the October election cannot be stressed enough. Fico’s re-election was not just a run-of-the-mill election but a harsh rejection of Brussels’ authority both in Slovakia and internationally. Of course, the EU will only benefit as long as Fico is recuperating. But if he recovers enough to continue doing his job, I highly doubt he’ll have the appetite to do anything nice for EU leftists and will only seek to further ingratiate SMER in the populist movement. Whatever the truth of Cintula’s motives, Fico understands that opposing Brussels has nearly cost him his life. That kind of thing changes people.
Conspiracies are tempting to ponder. And it’s true that Brussels announced that “fake news” about the assassination will be censored. (Incidentally, hardcore Eurocrat Vera Jourova just visited Silicon Valley to learn how to better censor their opponents) But while we in the popular sphere might debate such a thing until kingdom come, if the EU was involved and Fico finds out about it - and I’m sure he knows how to obtain such information - nothing we ponder in our armchairs will matter.
Conclusion
If Fico’s past life with mistresses able to access public money is any indication, there is no doubt that Fico has his corrupt side. He has never fallen into the saint category, and I think he’d be the first to admit it. But now he is almost a martyr. He is certainly that which so many in today’s world aspire to be: a genuine victim. Bullets are very unambiguous things.
As his party members in SMER have been quick to point out, a long campaign of anti-Fico rhetoric preceded the assassination attempt. This in and of itself will be an interesting discussion. Will Slovaks decide that the political rhetoric has to be toned down in the name of civility? Or will it be decided that this level of antagonism was a net good because a politician many didn’t like was almost killed? It’s hard to know what to think: Fico’s enemies have been calling for calm, which is the responsible thing to do. But they also benefit from the calm, especially this close to EU elections. They don’t really have a choice. SMER and its allies don’t appear to wish to remain calm. But whether they can use the attack against Fico to their benefit remains to be seen. It is very much a topic for a Slovak author of the Genitalist disposition. (More on that in a future post)
The assassination appears to have increased the level of antagonism online considerably. As The Slovak Spectator reports (though without mentioning any one “side”):
the attack on Fico has led to another wave of hatred on the Internet. According to elv.ai, a firm that moderates online discussions, the toxicity of comments under the posts of 60 media outlets and public institutions increased up to 60 percent, compared to the worst day in the history of monitoring their profiles. They recorded a total of 71,818 comments on Wednesday, while the rate of hateful comments reached up to 21.62 percent.
"The attack on Prime Minister Fico increased hatred on social networks to a level we have not seen before," said elv.ai CEO Jakub Šuster.
On second though: a pessimistic country known for its rich and colorful slang and “better” rap music than the Czechs abandoning vitriolic rhetoric? Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
While this idea has so far only come in the form of whispers and suppositions, I do not relish the idea of Slovakia devolving into a Civil War as some have speculated. Enough Slavs are dying in Ukraine right now on both sides as other countries gloat about it like the schoolteacher in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. History has shown that the West benefits tremendously from Slavic suffering. The country of Pavol Orszagh Hviezdoslav, the greatest anti-war poet, would be a terrible casualty to that which the great poet found so revolting.
A Slovak Civil War would, at the least, be an ugly and useless blight upon the map of Europe. At most, it would be devastating. It is also not a desirable outcome for those who hate Putin. One of these “sides” would certainly have a pro-Russia side to it. The opportunity for Putin to use that as a means of fomenting conflict in NATO countries would be irresistible; Russian involvement in the breakaway Donbas de facto countries has given the Russians experience in these matters. And because latent pro-Communist sympathies in the West have led many to believe that neutrality over the Spanish Civil War was some kind of crime - it was actually one of the few wise moves the 1930s democracies made - the possibility of Western interest groups who know nothing about Slovakia interfering and making things worse is extremely likely. It will set a trend of large-scale, corporate colonization of Greater Slavia, a phenomenon currently at work in Ukraine while most people are distracted by the fighting.
The use of Greater Slavia as an ideological laboratory is still, apparently, a reality. End of history my ass!
There is still a wild card in Slovakia in the political sense: Marian Kotleba, a genuine fascist albeit in the “homegrown” mold: an inheritor of the legacy of Josef Tiso’s First Slovak Republic. Though formerly the governor of the Banska Bystrica region, it is highly unlikely he’d hold a position in government that size again, let alone in Bratislava. In peacetime, that is: a Civil War could change that. The Falangists were not a huge movement in Spain when 1936 came around. And much as insincere armchair historians would love to deny it, the Spanish rebels were a pluralistic combination of monarchists, pro-military politicos, Catholics and nationalists as well as Falangists. The jury is still out even as far as Franco’s personal fascism is concerned: there is, however, no such jury needed where Kotleba is concerned.
Will Slovaks be able to take a chill pill? I have strong doubts about that. If Fico recovers, he has the experience to bring economic normalcy to Slovakia. But that won’t be enough because Slovakia’s divides are deeper and more fundamental than economic well-being.
Unlike Poland, where the bootlicker Tusk is sabotaging the genuine emergence of Poland as a minor power in Europe to please Eurocrat ideologues, Slovakia is small and problematic enough to where stating “the EU will save us” is a rational and sensible argument. But Slovakia is also a sovereign country that, if not Switzerland, probably ranks a lot higher on every metric than many other countries in the world. But Slovaks don’t care about the rest of the world: they care about their home. It is difficult to see what kind of political solution will satisfy Slovaks and take into account the diversity of opinion that separates them and the harsh demands of differentiation these viewpoints require.
There is some silver lining, however. Much as either side would hate to admit it, most Slovak political perspectives are rational and based upon solid worldviews. The Slovaks are not a head-in-the-clouds people with abstract wool in their eyes. It is only in the mouths of “elected idiots” where those worldviews look unhinged and crazy. But for every “elected idiot,” there are a thousand or more common sense people. I predict that any Slovak politician who can channel that common sense will succeed. Fico, ironically, has already set a precedent. But Slovakia is a beautiful country with great potential. It can do better. And in the long run, I think it will. As long as it avoids Civil War.
For now, things remain as calm as one could hope for following a development like this. I hope it remains that way.
This according to early Slovak Prime Minister Jozef Moravčík. From Wikipedia.
https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/audio-podcast-5-59-fico-znovu-saha-po-vitezstvi-vsechno-ale-muze-byt-jinak-rika-novinarka-235436
From Balkan Insight.
Very informative.
I've always been disgusted by romanticization of the Mafia.