Prime Minister Robert Fico in July. The Slovakian leader, who has been purging his opponents from a wide range of institutions, survived an assassination attempt in May.
Credit...Radovan Stoklasa/Reuters

After Being Shot, Slovakia’s Leader Targets His Enemies

Prime Minister Robert Fico has purged prosecutors, cultural officials, journalists and others he believes fueled “hatred and aggression” against him.

by · NY Times

When Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia returned to work this summer after recovering from gunshot wounds from a May assassination attempt, he released a video message titled “I forgive and I warn.”

Since then, there has been scant sign of forgiveness. But Mr. Fico has more than delivered on his warning to those he considers political enemies.

In recent weeks, he has presided over a rolling purge of anticorruption prosecutors, museum and theater directors, journalists and others he holds responsible for an atmosphere of “hatred and aggression” that he says led to the attack.

While his supporters cheer what they see as a long overdue cleansing of a system dominated by liberal elites, his critics see a vindictive, scattershot assault on people with little in common other than their shared role as perceived foes of Mr. Fico and his far-right allies in a coalition government.

The pace has been so rapid and its scope so wide that many in Bratislava, the liberal-leaning capital, are filled with foreboding that he wants to diminish the space for critical voices. Mr. Fico, they say, is taking Slovakia down the illiberal road charted by Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader of neighboring Hungary, including by setting a course that is more antagonistic to the West and more friendly toward Russia.

“He really changed physically and psychologically after he was shot, and it is becoming really dangerous,” said Lubos Machaj, 70, a widely respected journalist who has known Mr. Fico for years and lost his job as director general of Slovakia’s state-funded public broadcaster in July.

He was not fired: His old job simply ceased to exist after the government liquidated the public broadcaster, RTVS, and created a new one, STVR.

Mr. Fico “is attacking all the pillars of our democracy,” Mr. Machaj said.

That, said Lubos Blaha, deputy chairman of Mr. Fico’s governing Smer party, is just the “hysterical” chatter of Bratislava liberals.

“They say we are becoming more authoritarian and undemocratic. We are just trying to introduce more balance,” Mr. Blaha said, insisting that the actions were a response to “a world where the prime minister was almost killed by a person brainwashed by liberals.” Mr. Fico’s office did not respond to an interview request.

The prime minister has described the man charged with the assassination attempt — a 71-year-old amateur poet, Juraj Cintula — as a “messenger of evil and political hatred” sent by his enemies.

But no evidence has been made public that Mr. Cintula, had any fixed political views or connection to Mr. Fico’s opponents. The government initially described him as a “lone wolf” but later claimed he might have had accomplices.

Soon after Mr. Machaj was ousted from the public broadcaster, the same fate met Michal Surek, a prosecutor involved in corruption cases against members and allies of the governing party, Smer.

The special prosecutor’s office where he had worked was abolished in March, but he had kept working on several sensitive cases, including one involving a prominent Smer legislator.

In July, the general prosecutor, an ally of Mr. Fico, suspended Mr. Surek.

Then, a corrupt prosecutor whom Mr. Surek had put behind bars in 2021 by securing his conviction for bribery and leaking secret investigation files was released from prison at the request of Mr. Fico’s justice minister.

“They are taking revenge against people who made their life difficult,” Mr. Surek said.

Katarina Batkova, the executive director of Via Iuris, which researches legal issues, described Mr. Surek as “a clean and professional guy” who could not be compromised “so they had to get rid of him.”

Mr. Orban has done much the same in Hungary. After years of silencing independent voices, he has turned Hungary’s vibrant democracy into what is essentially a single-party state.

Mr. Fico has also emulated Mr. Orban in decrying the West’s support for Ukraine, denouncing NATO and the European Union, of which Slovakia is a member. He disbanded some government offices set up to counter Russian disinformation about the war and other issues.

But Mr. Fico has done nothing to block Western aid and has allowed Slovak weapons manufacturers to keep selling to Ukraine and allowed other countries to transport arms bound for Ukraine through Slovakia.

And unlike Mr. Orban, whose party has a large majority in Parliament, Mr. Fico has only a tenuous grip. His party failed to win a majority in elections last September, and his survival as prime minister depends on legislators from the ultranationalist Slovak National Party.

“We are moving in Hungary’s direction, but we are not there yet,” said Michal Simecka, the leader of the main opposition party, Progressive Slovakia. “In Slovakia you still have many independent media and some independent institutions, though of course they are now all under assault.”

One of the main targets in recent weeks has been cultural institutions.

Alexandra Kusa, the director of Slovakia’s national art gallery since 2010, said she had been axed in early August.

She said she was not particularly surprised. The head of the Slovak National Theater was fired the day before and the culture minister, Martina Simkovicova, has been vocal in her disdain for a cultural establishment she sees as too pro-European and out of touch with Slovak values and its traditional affinity with Russia.

“We have all known since the election that we were not compatible with the current government,” Ms. Kusa said.

Mr. Fico, a former leftist turned nationalist, has long had a combative relationship with Slovakia’s cultural, media and intellectual elites, saying they sneer at ordinary people and their values in favor of promoting things like L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

Ms. Kusa said that replacing the heads of some state-funded cultural institutions was fairly routine after a change of government. But the wave of dismissals, she added, had gone far beyond usual post-election churn.

The head of the national library, a children’s museum and other institutions have lost their jobs at the hands of Ms. Simkovicova, a member of Mr. Fico’s far-right coalition partner. The culture minister has also slashed funding for bodies out of step with her views.

“I stand by my work,” Ms. Simkovicova said in a message on Telegram, denouncing her critics as “supporters of the progressive agenda” who “call for tolerance but are absolutely intolerant of other opinions.”

Most worrying, said Mr. Simecka, the opposition party leader, has been the government’s drive to overhaul the legal system to restrict protests and make it more difficult to prosecute corruption cases.

A revised criminal code that went into force recently reduces sentences for economic crimes and tightens the statute of limitations for prosecution, meaning that politicians from Mr. Fico’s party who faced prosecution before last year’s election now have little to fear.

An elite anti-corruption police unit was disbanded in August, after the abolition of Mr. Surek’s special prosecutor’s office.

The special prosecutor’s office had been in Mr. Fico’s sights for years because of its role in investigating the 2018 murder of a Slovak journalist, who had been reporting on government corruption, and his fiancée.

Accusations that a businessman with ties to the government, headed at the time of the murder by Mr. Fico, had ordered the killings set off huge street protests that forced Mr. Fico to resign. And that left him nursing a deep grievance against what he saw as a justice system dominated by enemies.

“I keep 10 percent of my energy for revenge,” he told political and business friends in 2021, according to the transcript of a secret recording made by investigators.

The following year, Mr. Fico and a longtime Smer party ally, Robert Kalinak, who is now defense minister, were charged with organized crime offenses. The case was later shut down by the prosecutor general, who in late July ordered Mr. Surek suspended.

“The only agenda they have now is a vendetta — and making sure that Smer and people connected to Smer are free from justice,” Mr. Simecka said.

Mr. Blaha, the Smer vice chairman, instead said the government is “just doing what we promised in last year’s election. We have a mandate to make changes.”

Marek Janiga contributed reporting.

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