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More than a quarter of a century has passed since the United States called Slovakia a “black hole at the heart of Europe,” an island of authoritarian stagnation surrounded by emerging democracies. This insult, hurled by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1997 against countries that joined NATO and the European Union, still stings today.
But some people in the central European country, appalled by last week’s assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico and the ensuing frenzy of political accusations, including warnings of civil war, believed Mr. Albright was up to something. I am wondering if this is the case. .
“We’re back in a black hole. I don’t know if we ever got out of it,” said Roman Kvasnica, a prominent Slovak lawyer, adding that threats and personal insults are common in politics. Blaming the culture. In his own legal work, he has received numerous warnings in 2018 that he would receive a “shot in the head” from a tycoon accused of ordering the murder of an investigative journalist who investigated government corruption. I have faced threats.
Exasperated by the country’s divisive struggle to establish the rule of law and resist the temptations of strongman leadership, this lawyer built a symbol of democratic idealism on the wall of his rural home in western Slovakia. Displays a portrait of Vaclav Havel. Havel served as the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, which amicably split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic in 1993.
According to Kvasnica, Havel, a former playwright who wrote about the fall of the Berlin Wall and later became president of the Czech Republic, was not following the path of Slovakia, which spent much of the same period under the Berlin Wall. He said it reminded him of the road. the reign of Vladimir Meciar, an early pioneer of populism with nationalist overtones and a master of polarization-mongering;
Hopes that Slovak politicians might be able to overcome their hateful feud with each other collapsed on Sunday as efforts to get opposing parties to sit together and agree on “ground rules for a decent political struggle” collapsed. It deflated when President-elect Peter Pellegrini announced that he had done so. He said recent demonstrations had shown that “despite the aftermath of such an unfathomable tragedy, some politicians are simply unable to show any basic remorse.”
Deputy Prime Minister Peter Kalinak, who is running the government in the absence of the seriously injured Fico, added to fears by backtracking on earlier claims by officials that the gunman was a “lone wolf”.
“The situation seems to be getting worse,” Kalinac said at a news conference in the capital Bratislava on Sunday. He said the new evidence “indicates that there was some assistance in concealing clues and that a third party acted in favor of the perpetrator.”
“All of this is shocking and for many of us it would be much easier if we could just talk about one person,” he added.
The only person charged so far in the case is a 71-year-old amateur poet, a former coal miner, a mason and a supermarket security guard. According to people who knew him in his hometown of Levice in central Slovakia, the man, named only by authorities as Juraj C., often flitted between conflicting objectives and had no affiliation with either of the two main political camps. There was no strong connection between them.
But people who know him say he harbors intense dissatisfaction with the entire system, which is not uncommon in Slovakia.
Among the Central and Eastern European countries that threw off communist rule in 1989, Slovakia has the highest proportion of citizens who see liberal democracy as a threat to their own identity and values, even more so than the neighboring Czech Republic. It was 43% compared to 15%. Support for Russia has declined sharply since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but support among Slovaks is 27% see Russia as an important strategic partner, the highest level in the region.
Grigory Meseznikov, director of the Bratislava Institute of Public Relations, said these views highlight deep contradictions for Slovakia, which by many standards is a model of a successful transition from communism. It is a manufacturing hub for German car manufacturers, has developed a vibrant and diverse media environment, and has become increasingly integrated into the European Union, making it the only country in the region to use a common currency, the euro.
But many citizens, particularly those living outside of large cities, feel left behind and resentful, and are “more vulnerable than other regions to conspiracy theories and the narrative that liberal democracy is a threat.” Meseznikov said.
The situation is much the same in many other former communist countries, allowing Prime Minister Viktor Orban of neighboring Hungary to establish an increasingly authoritarian regime. But Slovak politics is particularly toxic, riddled with wild conspiracy theories and bile.
The foundations were laid by Mr. Messiard in the 1990s, forming a coalition of right-wing nationalists, business cronies and anti-establishment leftists that remains one of the country’s two main political blocs. Mezeznikov said they all got excited by accusing their centrist and liberal opponents of being enemies who were trying to sell out the country’s interests to the West.
“The Messiah was a pioneer,” he says. “He is a typical representative of national populism with an authoritarian approach, and so is Fico.”
On the day Mr. Fico was shot dead, parliament was meeting to advocate for an overhaul of public television to clean out what the ruling party sees as unfair bias in favor of political opponents, which was launched in the 1990s. It was a repeat of Mecial’s efforts to silence media critics. .
The bill was part of a package of measures that the European Commission said in February risked “irreparable damage” to the rule of law. These include measures to limit corruption investigations and impose what critics have denounced as Russian-style regulations on non-governmental organizations. The government opposes military aid to Ukraine and LGBTQ rights, is often at odds with the European Union, and, like Mr. Orban, supports warmer relations with President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
In the run-up to last September’s general elections that brought Fico, a central figure in Slovak politics for more than two decades, back to power, he and his allies offered sympathetic rhetoric as well as increasingly hostile statements toward the United States and Ukraine. took an attitude. For Russia.
Their comments are often reminiscent of those of Mr. Messiar, who resisted demands in the 1990s that Slovakia must change its ways if it wanted to join the European Union and held up Russia as an alternative haven. To the west, we go to the east. ”
Dominik Zelinski, a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, believes that despite the current intensity of political tensions, Slovakia is once again leaving the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to become “a complete outsider.” “There is no risk today,” he said.
But, he added, “the frameworks that societies and their elites use to interpret conflicts remain the same: the choice between following the Western path or becoming something of a bridge between East and West; And it is the choice of liberal democracy,” he added. and an illiberal, authoritarian government. ”
When Mr. Fico first became prime minister in 2006, he was on the left, but the nationalists, who had previously allied themselves with Mr. Mecial, needed help to form a stable government. They turned to the Slovak People’s Party, an organization.
Andrei Danko, head of the party that is part of the new coalition government formed by Fico after September elections, said the assassination attempt marked “the beginning of a political war” between the two countries. . enemy camp.
The government, which critics have accused of stoking dangerous tensions and hostility toward the media, responded by claiming the other side had started the fight by blaming Fico and his allies for the 2018 murder of an investigative journalist.
“Not just Roberto Fico, but all of us have been labeled murderers,” Deputy Prime Minister Kalinac told a Czech newspaper about the incident on Saturday. “If I were to use the same yardstick now as I used then, I would say they are murderers.”
Sociologist Iveta Radíková, a former prime minister and Fico opponent, said Slovakia’s predicament was part of a broader crisis whose roots go far beyond the early stumbles under Mecial. Ta.
“Many democracies are headed into a black hole,” she said, with countries from Hungary in the east to the Netherlands in the west succumbing to the lure of national populism. “This change is happening everywhere.”
Sara Cincurova and Marek Janiga contributed reporting from Bratislava, Slovakia.
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