A prime minister shot down by a 71-year-old assassin
Assassination attempts on political leaders are mercifully rare in Europe, said Tony Connelly on RTÉ (Dublin). In 2002, a gunman fired at French president Jacques Chirac as he was reviewing troops on Bastille Day, but missed. In 2003, Serbian PM Zoran Ðindjic was assassinated in Belgrade and, the same year, Sweden’s foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was stabbed to death in a Stockholm department store. Since then, however, such threats have been limited. Until now. Last week, the Slovak PM Robert Fico was gunned down by a 71-year-old poet while glad-handing voters in a rural constituency. He was flown by helicopter to hospital, where he underwent life-saving surgery and is now in a stable condition.
No one’s yet sure of the gunman’s motive, said Alexandria WilsonMcDonald on The Conversation. But that this latest attempt took place in Slovakia is not altogether surprising. This small centralEuropean nation of 5.5 million, which in 1993 split from the Czech Republic, is one of the most politically polarised societies in Europe. “We’re on the verge of civil war,” warned the interior minister after last week’s attack. But it wasn’t always like this, said Cassandra Vinograd in The New York Times. Until recently, parties of the centre-left and -right “calmly traded places after elections and agreed on most things”. What we’ve seen in Slovakia is a stark example of a trend across Europe: centrist politicians moving increasingly to the populist right. Fico personifies this, says Barbara Piotrowska at King’s College London. Denied a role in the former communist party that took control in the post-independence years, he went off and built his own centre-left “anti-corruption” party – Smer – in 1999: it has dominated Slovak politics ever since. Fico himself was initially seen as pragmatic and unideological. Yet after returning to power in 2012, he became an increasingly polarising figure and, in 2018, following the mass protests held across the country in response to the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak, he was forced to resign. Kuciak had been looking into allegations that Smer and the Italian Mafia were engaged in high-level corruption and embezzling EU funds. Fico himself was briefly arrested in 2022, charged with organised crime offences.
People thought that was it for Fico, says Alexandria WilsonMcDonald. But in the years that followed, he repositioned himself as a traditionalist, a fighter for the common man, an enemy of Brussels, and a friend of Vladimir Putin. During the pandemic, he raged against the government’s Covid restrictions; he won Catholic support by deriding the liberal agenda of newly elected president Zuzana Caputová, a supporter of LGBTQ+ and abortion rights (the Church is still powerful in Slovakia – the state finances priests’ salaries and over 50% of people identify as Catholics). And so, in the 2023 election, Fico came “roaring back to power”, said Tom Nicholson on Politico (Brussels). Since then he has gutted the elite police unit that had charged him with crimes, cracked down on the independent media and threatened to label NGOs with foreign funding as “foreign agents”. That is the highly volatile political backdrop to last week’s attempted murder.