Robert Fico at the hearing. (source: Sme)
When Robert Fico, on January 23, entered the room where parliament’s constitutional affairs committee was grilling candidates for seats on the Constitutional Court, a sudden murmur arose.
Compared to the hearings that had come before, the room was packed, with journalists and MPs, among them opposition deputies, waiting their turn to ask Fico some unfriendly questions.
The Slovak public, hardly used to seeing their politicians in this kind of setup, could observe some flashes of Fico’s celebrity hauteur.
Fico is not one to be grilled. He does not even feel he should have to prove his fitness for the post of Constitutional Court judge: when confronted with an opposition MP’s question about why the length of time he has actually spent practising law does not seem to add up to the required 15 years, he did not humbly explain how he believed it did, but instead refused to give a direct answer and branded the question “undignified”.
