Change is possible, Slovakia’s story shows

But how many chances does one country get?

Five years without Jan and Martina gathering in Bratislava. Five years without Jan and Martina gathering in Bratislava. (Source: TASR)

Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Five years after the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak, the masterminds behind the crime have not been convicted and the country is sinking into ever-deeper frustration. One year of war has tested Slovaks too, and the results are sobering. The killer of Henry Acorda is out of prison after serving only one-third of his sentence.

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It has been five years since journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were murdered in their home in Veľká Mača, a village in western Slovakia. After the initial shock, most of Slovakia’s society understood that the assassination of a journalist – the couple were killed by gunshots at close range – was cause for grief but also a disturbing sign of “something evil under the surface”, as then president Andrej Kiska put it a few weeks later, amid the political turmoil that gave rise to a new Slovakia – albeit one that is still a work in progress.

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Many would brand the previous sentence an optimistic, perhaps even naive, assessment. In the wake of the murder, there was a lot of grief – over the death of two young people but also over the condition of a state that had failed to prevent it from happening. That grief was quickly transformed into constructive anger and then hope, embodied in the election of the current president, Zuzana Čaputová, in 2019.

On the fifth anniversary of the murders, viewers in Slovakia had the chance to see a documentary that tells the story of the murder from the outside, by an American filmmaker. As such, it provides a good way for any outsider to understand the basics of what had been going on in the country before the crime occurred, and what has transpired since.

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