Slovak opposition claims Sep election will be stolen - and too many believe it

Three-time former prime minister Robert Fico and his populist Smer party routinely warn that Slovakia's early election set for September will be manipulated, despite offering no evidence. Last week Fico went even further.

“There’s a coup happening in Slovakia,” he claimed during a press conference headlined “Police Coup” on August 17. “The situation is changing six weeks before the election.”

The opposition leader hardened his rhetoric almost a week after Tibor Gašpar, a police chief from the era of Smer governments who was forced to step down following mass protests after the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak in 2018, was detained for two days and charged with corruption. Accused of organised crime, corruption and abuse of power in two other high-profile cases, Gašpar spent a year in custody in 2021.

Today, the former top police officer is number nine on the election slate for Smer, which has been leading opinion polls since March. The liberal Progresívne Slovensko party is the only other party to come close.

Smer is far from being the only party claiming without evidence that the parliamentary election set for September 30 will be rigged. The extremist Republika, Hlas and Slovak National (SNS) parties have adopted similar narratives. They promise to conduct parallel vote counting on the day of the election to prevent irregularities.

While Republika and Hlas hold seats in the current parliament and are expected to win seats in the next one, the SNS, led by Andrej Danko, a former parliamentary speaker who admires both Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, currently has no seats in parliament, though its rise in the polls in the past three months has put it at or just above the 5-percent threshold.

Like Gašpar and Fico, Danko and Hlas leader Peter Pellegrini, who left Smer in 2020, have declared that the arrest of Smer’s number nine candidate was designed to influence the election.

Smer leader Robert Fico poses in front of a camera with a supporter during a Smer gathering in August 2023. (source: TASR - František Iván)

Reflecting its status as one of the most conspiracy-prone nations in the region, up to 53 percent of Slovaks agreed in May that the September election could be manipulated, the Central European Digital Media Observatory found. But according to an AKO poll the following month, people’s fear of a rigged election stood at 36.2 percent, down by 4.9 percentage points from April. The fear is, nevertheless, much higher among supporters of Smer, Republika and SNS, comfortably more than half of whom say they expect there to be manipulation.

Fico has already named those whom he alleges are behind the supposed attempts to rig the election and defeat Smer: 93-year-old Hungarian-American financier George Soros, organisations funded by him, and President Zuzana Čaputová. The latter, at least according to Fico, is a puppet controlled by Soros, who is a favourite bogeyman for conspiracy theorists worldwide.

“Big money from Soros has been invested here so that Fico will be defeated,” the ex-prime minister recently claimed, referring to himself in the third person. He warned of more attacks on the opposition that would help Progresívne Slovensko, of which Čaputová used to be a member before she became president. “Goals are precisely set,” he said.

Čaputová denied that either she or the interim technocratic government were behind Gašpar’s arrest or any other, previous or future, police operation. She further rejected the claim that she wants to destroy the opposition.

Regardless, Fico continued his attacks on the president. “You have started a war that you can never win, and you will end up very badly,” the Smer leader said on Thursday.

Accused Smer politician and former police chief Tibor Gašpar.

Hungary accused of interference in campaign

The arrest of Gašpar also caught the attention of Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó. The very next day, the Hungarian politician claimed on social media that the “international liberal mainstream” is preying on politicians like Gašpar and Donald Trump because they defend conservative values and national interests.

“It does not shy away from any kind of harsh intervention, the deployment of police and judicial tools, if it feels its power is in danger,” Szijjártó said on August 12.

His state secretary Tamás Menczer later chimed in, stating ironically: “It is obviously, completely accidental that the politician had to be arrested 48 days before the election.

Several Slovak politicians – including some from Slovakia’s Hungarian minority – and MEPs condemned Szijjártó for his criticism of the Slovak police and accused him of meddling in the country’s election campaign. Some went further and demanded Hungarian ambassador Csaba Balogh be summoned to the Foreign Ministry to explain the latest comments by the head of Hungarian diplomacy, which came less than a month after Balogh had to explain Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s characterisation of Slovakia as Hungary’s “breakaway territory” in comments during a festival in Romania.

Fico, an admirer of the nationalist-populist Orbán and a potential ally for Hungary, which is currently isolated in the EU, was not among the critics. “I want to congratulate Minister Szijjártó on how well he described the situation,” Fico said at a press conference on August 13.

Unlike Gašpar, who has since been released on bail and denies the charges against him, Fico and his political ally and ex-interior minister Robert Kaliňák had organised crime charges – these concerned the alleged procurement and misuse of sensitive tax data against their political opponents – controversially scrapped by the General Prosecutor’s Office last year. The office has been criticised, and seen its reputation tarnished, after overturning numerous decisions by line prosecutors and investigators in sensitive cases over the past three years. To do this it has used Section 363 of the Criminal Code, which grants the general prosecutor extraordinary powers but had previously been little-used. It was employed yet again earlier this month to dismiss another corruption charge against Robert Kaliňák.

Police chief Štefan Hamran. (source: TASR - Jakub Kotian)

Today, Fico also claims that the National Crime Agency (NAKA) and the Special Prosecutor’s Office will try to charge Kaliňák and himself, as well as intervene against prosecutors from the General Prosecutor’s Office and regional prosecutors, in the lead-up to the election. Last week, he predicted that Michal Aláč, head of Slovakia’s main intelligence agency (SIS), would also face charges.

And in this, Fico was right.

Top security service bosses charged; Fico sees a coup

A week after Gašpar’s arrest, on August 17, NAKA charged six more people with obstructing investigations into prominent corruption cases – mostly those from Fico’s time in office – involving organised crime and the abuse of power.

Among those charged are Aláč and his predecessor Vladimír Pčolinský. The latter faces a corruption charge. Both men, Pčolinský and Aláč, were nominated for the top spy post by Sme Rodina. Led by Speaker Boris Kollár, this populist party was part of the OĽaNO-led governments of the past three years. OĽaNO has long called itself an anti-corruption movement.

The current head of the National Security Authority (NBÚ), Roman Konečný, is also facing charges. The NBÚ is tasked with the protection of classified information and cybersecurity.

Although the police have been inspired by Biblical references when naming high-profile corruption cases in recent years – for instance ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Ezekiel’ – the police did not follow this pattern in their latest operation. Instead, they called it ‘Conflict Unravelling’, implying an end to the much-discussed internal ‘war’ that’s been going on within the police service.

Dating back to 2021, this struggle chiefly concerns a conflict between two bodies: NAKA, which falls under the police and investigates serious crime, and the Interior Ministry’s police inspectorate, which looks into police misconduct. Prosecutors, the SIS, and even politicians have also been caught up in the war.

The conflict revolves around investigations into corruption and organised crime. Several former high-ranking police, SIS and tax authority officials from the time when Smer was in power have admitted to corruption and decided to cooperate with NAKA. A case in point: Purgatory, the most notorious high-profile case of all, is looking into allegations that Gašpar and his relative and oligarch Norbert Bödör created an organised crime group within the police, manipulated the investigation of various cases, and bribed police officers.

A Security Council meeting on August 18, 2023. (source: Facebook/President Zuzana Čaputová)

Subsequently, based on a leaked confidential SIS report from 2021, the police inspectorate accused several NAKA investigators grouped around senior investigator Ján Čurilla, who were dealing with Smer-linked criminal cases, of the manipulation of cooperating defendants. The report cited no evidence.

The investigators around Čurilla still, technically, face abuse-of-power charges, despite a Bratislava court having stated in a ruling that they are unjustified. Whether the Bratislava prosecutor will actually file charges with the court, based on about 7,000 hours of wiretapped recordings from the office of the charged NAKA investigators and imprecise transcripts, is expected to be announced before the parliamentary election.

Fico has long claimed that all the ongoing investigations linked to Smer are being manipulated.

Political analyst Jozef Lenč from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University notes that these investigations and prosecutions are unlikely to have any impact on Smer voters. “They believe that the prosecuted Smer politicians and candidates are victims of opposition persecution,” he explains.

Fico regularly questions the credibility of cooperating defendants, and uses edited audio files and transcripts at press conferences to discredit potential witnesses, the special prosecutors and the accused NAKA investigators.

“A group of criminals at NAKA and prosecutors from the Special Prosecutor’s Office have participated in the liquidation of the opposition since 2020,” Fico repeated last week. In 2020, OĽaNO won the election and promised to “untie the hands of the police” so it could investigate high-level corruption.

Fico added that, in addition to the accused investigators and special prosecutors, Progresívne Slovensko and Zuzana Čaputová have benefited from these supposed attacks on the opposition.

The Smer leader has suggested that the accused NAKA investigators might disclose who gave the orders to act against the opposition as soon as they read the indictments against them. “This [disclosure] is a tragedy that they [Čaputová, special prosecutors, political opponents] could not imagine,” Fico said, claiming that the president and Progresívne Slovensko are now trying not only to destroy Smer to win the election, but also to take over all branches of the security services to keep themselves out of trouble.

Smer politicians Robert Kaliňák (l) and Robert Fico (r) hold a press conference to criticise recent police operations on August 17, 2023. Demokrati MP Juraj Šeliga stands in the foreground to attack Smer. (source: SITA - Diana Cernak)

As for the latest police intervention, Fico described it as “one desperate attempt by the president and the entire gang” to change the situation before the parliamentary election.

Consequently, Fico has demanded the removal of police chief Štefan Hamran, whom he called an “untouchable Indian holy cow” protected by the president. Hamran was appointed police chief by OĽaNO. Smer and its allies allege he has links to Progresívne Slovensko, based on a 2019 photo that shows Hamran with the party’s then leader, Michal Truban.

Mystery meeting and Fico’s letter to NATO

Čaputová, who has announced she will not seek re-election in 2024, also called on Slovak citizens to join electoral ward election commissions and check the progress of the September election amid the claims about stolen elections coming from populists and extremists.

Various mechanisms and some 6,000 electoral ward election commissions make vote rigging virtually impossible in Slovakia, experts say.

Even so, Smer politicians maintained in May that somebody from the then-government sent a group of 25 Slovaks, ranging from public servants to NGO workers, to Brussels in mid-April to ask EU and NATO representatives to intervene in the upcoming election and against the Slovak opposition. The party said it had obtained unofficial documents from the Defence Ministry that back up its claims on what it calls the “Slovak Watergate” scandal. Fico also suspects the involvement of President Čaputová, as the then-Eduard Heger government was an interim one and did not possess full competences.

Yet the truth was more prosaic: it turned out that those people had attended a seminar on disinformation and hybrid threats, and asked the EU and NATO representatives to provide Slovakia with counter-hybrid support teams.

In early June, Fico also spied a problem in a planned NATO public awareness campaign, “Why Ukraine Matters”, which was supposed to highlight the importance of NATO for the security of Slovakia. Fico wrote a letter to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in which he claimed that the campaign could be considered “an intervention in the election campaign to damage the opposition”, as it targets Smer voters who may have a view on the war in Ukraine different from NATO’s. Smer does not support military support for Ukraine. Therefore, Fico asked NATO to postpone the campaign until after the election.

President Zuzana Čaputová and PM Ľudovít Ódor during a press briefing on August 18, 2023. (source: TASR - Jaroslav Novák)

Fico has been talking of manipulated elections since March. He claimed back then that “the possibility of falsifying the results of parliamentary elections is imminent”. The threat is three times higher than six months ago, he alleged at the weekend.

Yet Smer has also been on the receiving end of this conspiracy theory. The former defence minister Jaroslav Naď (Demokrati) in late May spoke of a potentially rigged election after a Slovak citizen reportedly travelled to Moscow to collect money to be spent on the manipulation of elections in favour of Smer. Naď has not since provided any more details, because, he says, it’s classified information.

Smer inevitably denied the allegation, with Fico laughing it off, claiming that Vladimir Putin had called him and asked him how many percentage points Smer needed to win the election. “I told him, ‘There is no need, we will rig it ourselves but a few million euros would come in handy’,” joked Fico.

Daniel Milo, head of the Interior Ministry’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, told Aktuality.sk that election fraud is a very dangerous topic. In its 2022 report on disinformation, the police noted that Slovakia could see riots similar to the ones seen in the US in January 2021 after the September election.

“In the event of dissatisfaction by a certain part of the political spectrum, the results of the election may be questioned, which could turn into organised riots and attacks on state institutions,” Milo said.

This story was produced in partnership with Reporting Democracy, a cross-border journalism platform run by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.