Slovakia - Robert Fico
Elections in Slovakia saw former Prime Minister Robert Fico secure the most votes. The pronunciation of Fico's name is a bit of a challenge, as some say "Fiso" and others say "Fiko" but it seems to be "Fitso" [FEET-soh]. His victory threatens to turn the small Central European country away from Western partners. Former strongman Prime Minster Robert Fico returned to power on September 30 when he won parliamentary elections in Slovakia, defeating his liberal rivals by some margin.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico suffered life-threatening injuries when he was shot and wounded in an attempted assassination. "During the night doctors managed to stabilize the patient's condition," Defense Minister Robert Kalinak said. "Unfortunately the condition continues to be very serious due to the complicated nature of the wounds, but we all want to believe firmly that we will succeed in managing the situation," said Kalinak, who also serves as deputy prime minister.
Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee for International Affairs, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Leonid Slutsky, indicated that the assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Vitso could be due to his political views that do not fit the stereotypes of the West's collective hegemony. What is the purpose of the assassination attempt on the Slovak Prime Minister? Who could be behind what happened?
The suspected shooter, who was detained at the scene, is a 71-year-old man from the town of Levice, according to Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok. The man was charged with the shooting on Thursday, with Estok saying investigators believed he was "lone wolf" who is "not a memeber of a radicalized political group, either right-wing or left-wing."
Fico's reported assailant, writer Juraj Cintula, was associated with pro-Russian paramilitary group Slovenskí Branci (SB). Their leader was even trained by Russian ex-Spetsnaz soldiers. Slovakia’s major opposition parties, Progressive Slovakia and Freedom and Solidarity, canceled a planned protest against a controversial government plan to overhaul public broadcasting that they say would give the government full control of public radio and television.
On September 30, 2023, the Smer party won early elections to the Slovak parliament. The party received 22.94% of the votes, which provides it with 42 seats in parliament. The liberal Progressive Slovakia (PS) party garnered just below 18%, while five other parties crossed the 5% threshold to enter parliament following a high-profile race driven by Fico's unlikely political resurrection. The turnout of 68.5% was the highest in 20 years. The radical-right Slovak National Party (SNS) just managed to cross the threshold and is seen as a natural partner for Smer. The same can be said of Hlas, a party that split from Smer in 2020. Hlas came third with around 15% of the vote, handing it the role of kingmaker.
As head of the nominally left-leaning Smer, Fico ruled Slovakia for much of the last decade despite regular accusations that he had turned the country into a "Mafia state." After his resignation following the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak, he embraced extremist and far-right rhetoric to remain relevant. An important emphasis in the party’s election program was placed on the return of the country’s foreign policy sovereignty and a diplomatic settlement of the conflict in Ukraine. In addition, the party intended to protect the memory of the Red Army soldiers who liberated Slovakia and defeated German fascism.
Popular Slovak politician Robert Fico, chairman of the opposition party Smer, was born in 1964 in the city of Topolcany in Slovakia. In 1986 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University named after Y.A. Comenius. Fico also has a doctorate in law.
From 1994 he served as Slovakia's agent for the European Commission of Human Rights until he was recalled in early 2000. Fico became visible in politics in 1992, when he was elected to the Slovak parliament. In 1999, Fico founded the Social Democratic Party (Smer, Smer-SD), the largest opposition political party in Slovakia.
Since 2005, Fico's party began to receive the majority of chairpersons' seats in regional elections. In 2006, Smer won the parliamentary elections, taking first place, Robert Fico became the country's prime minister. This became possible since the Prime Minister of Slovakia, as a rule, becomes the leader of the majority party or coalition in the National Council.
In his first two years as Prime Minister, Fico had not uttered a public word of praise or affirmation for U.S. foreign policy. With the notable exception of Afghanistan, whether it's Kosovo, missile defense, Iraq or Cuba -- Fico usually is explicitly or implicitly aligned against U.S. policy, and rarely misses an opportunity to take a gratuitous swipe at the U.S., and sometimes, by extension, the NATO Alliance.
By most measures, Robert Fico enjoyed great success in his two years as Slovakia's Prime Minister. Buoyed by economic statistics that are the envy of his regional counterparts, Fico's popularity was extraordinarily high among voters (ranging between 42-48 percent). Unemployment is falling and polls indicate that a majority of Slovaks are optimistic about the future. His government claimed credit not only for the robust economic growth that his reform-minded predecessor fostered, but also for Slovakia's entry into the Schengen zone and into the Eurozone. On the domestic political front, Fico emerged victorious in the fall 0f 2007 from a nasty public fight with his junior coalition partner Vladimir Meciar. Occasional disagreements among the coalition were settled to Fico's satisfaction because neither HZDS nor SNS wants to lose the benefits of coalition membership.
Meanwhile, an opposition that was riven by both inter and intra-party divisions posed no threat to Fico's popularity or legislative dominance. The dominant opposition party, SDKU, had seen its numbers slip below 10 percent in polling. Some within the party despair of Mikulas Dzurinda's refusal to relinquish power, because they know that no matter what strategies the party employs, it cannot rebound with such an unpopular figure at the helm. Dzurinda consistently polls as one of the least trusted of Slovak politicians. It's hard to imagine at this point that SDKU, or any opposition party for that matter, could succeed in making a significant dent in Fico's popularity.
Despite these objective measures of success, Fico appeared to derive little joy from the power he wields. His aggressiveness toward his perceived foes (media, opposition, NGOs and critics) is matched by an almost absurdly thin skin. The language Fico uses in his relentless campaign against the media and the opposition is often reminiscent of communist era politicians, or, to cite a more contemporary example, Alexander Lukashenko. Fico routinely accuses the media of lying, and has referred to reporters as "prostitutes," hyenas" and "slimy snakes."
Fico's agenda is a populist one, characterized by (seemingly) bold legislation, e.g., on price controls and small-scale, voter-friendly pork, such as new playgrounds and Christmas bonuses for retirees. According to the polls, this domestic-focused approach appeals to almost every category of voters, most of whom, like Fico himself, hold a rather narrow view of the appropriate scope of Slovakia's international engagement. The unseemliness of his coalition partners' rhetoric, suggest a degree of hubris and disregard for truth and probity, that may, over time, have negative consequences.
The generally favorable economic climate has contributed to a sense of well-being among the Slovaks, who after the difficult years of transition (the dark days of Meciar, and the sacrifices demanded by Dzurinda's march to EU membership), were content to savor hard-earned and sometimes unexpected achievements.
It was sweet victory for the "poor" half of the former Czechoslovakia, about which a Czech journalist commented in 1993: "When the split came, the Czechs got rid of the bad parts. We got rid of the old weapons factories...unemployment...and the old Soviet frontier. We got rid of all our problems and gave them to the Slovaks." Weak-to-inept or corrupt ministers; politicized bureaucracies plagued by low morale and lack of resources; a shortage of highly skilled labor; a crumbling health care system; nepotism and political favoritism in contracting. These are the real longer-term threats to Slovakia.
Fico served as Prime Minister until 2010. Calling the H1N1 influenza pandemic a "game of pharmaceutical companies," Prime Minister Robert Fico declared that he "doesn't believe in swine flu" and will not get vaccinated. This is just the latest in a series of occasionally paranoid conspiracy theories asserted by Fico in the last few months--he has previously alleged a conspiracy by Slovak media organizations against him, suggested that the financial crisis may have been intentional, and even expressed fear that he might be assassinated for knowing too much about the murky financing of opposition political party SDKU.
Robert Fico visited Russia several times. In 2009, he came to the Russian Federation twice, in 2015 he held negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin , with Dmitry Medvedev at that time the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, as well as with Sergei Naryshkin , at that time the Chairman of the State Duma. In 2016, he visited the Russian Federation again and held talks with Putin in the Kremlin.
In the 2012 elections, Smer, led by Fico, won 83 of 150 seats, becoming the first party to win a clear majority in the Slovak parliament since the country's independence. In 2012, Fico became Prime Minister of Slovakia for the second time.
In 2018, the political crisis in the country resulted in the resignation of Robert Fico as Prime Minister. On 15 March 2018 Fico resigned after more than two weeks of political turmoil and public protests sparked by the killing of an investigative journalist. The country's president, Andrej Kiska, on asked Fico's deputy, Peter Pellegrini, to form a new government. The resignation followed Slovakia's largest protests since the anti-communist Velvet Revolution of 1989.
Tens of thousands of Slovaks joined anti-government protests across the country last week to demand a thorough investigation in the shooting deaths of reporter Jan Kuciak and his girlfriend, Martina Kusnirova. At the time of his death last month, Kuciak, 27, had been writing about ties between the Italian organized-crime group known as the 'Ndrangheta and individuals close to Fico. The government of Slovakia has offered a $1.2 million reward for information about the killings.
The unsolved killing fueled public anger over corruption and threatened to bring down the coalition before the party leaders agreed to a change of guard. Protest leaders released a statement saying that the governing coalition, including the Smer party, had "humiliated and misled the whole public with its decision."
Since 2022, Fico repeatedly stated that he is against military support for Ukraine and in favor of a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. In his election statements in 2023, Fico promised that if representatives of the opposition party Smer entered the government, Slovakia would stop military assistance to Ukraine.
Fico is a one-man show. He runs Smer, the government and the coalition. Even in a small country such as Slovakia, that's a significant load. Views of Fico and what makes him tick vary, but two recent assessments (taken together) were on target. One Slovak politician who has known Fico as a student, a lawyer and a politician spoke about the unyielding ambition that has marked every facet of his career. He jokingly recounted that several MPs who used to play soccer with Fico said that none of his teammates ever wanted to pass him the ball, because he would never relinquish it.
Another political operative described Fico as a figure who, while not avoiding the limelight -- or for that matter, the hard slog of politics -- had never had a great deal of responsibility before 2006. Now, he neither enjoys it, nor does his temperament allow him to share the burdens -- any more than he shared the ball. According to this observer, the business interests that financed Smer's ascent wouldn't let him quit, even if he wanted to, because without Fico, Smer wouldn't exist.
Robert Fico is married to Svetlana Fitsova, who teaches at the Department of Civil Law at Charles University , and the couple have a son, Mikhail.
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