Martina Šimkovičová also presented herself as a painter on her Facebook page. (source: FB profile Martina Šimkovičová)
Welcome back to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia, where the culture minister’s steps are provoking mass protests, and calls for her to step down are intensifying.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
What you need to know about Slovakia’s culture minister
Slovakia is boiling – and I am not referring to the punishing heatwave we’ve been experiencing in recent weeks. Rather, it’s the conditions that Slovakia’s cultural institutions have had to weather during the same period, which have prompted artists and other people working in culture to come out onto the streets to protest the latest steps by Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová and her right-hand man at the ministry, chief of staff Lukáš Machala.
“Step down” was the most frequent chant from the 18,000-strong crowd gathered on Tuesday evening on Bratislava’s SNP Square, where the biggest demos of the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia, as well as the For a Decent Slovakia protests in 2018, took place. The protest was organised by the opposition parties Progressive Slovakia (PS) and Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) and followed a protest gathering the day before that was called by the Open Culture initiative and which attracted some 9,000 people, according to police estimates.
The protests came on the heels of two dismissals: first, the director of the Slovak National Theatre (SND), Matej Drlička, was fired in early August, followed by the sacking of the Slovak National Gallery’s (SNG) director, Alexandra Kusá, the very next day. These were the last straw for the many critics of the minister, who enjoys very little – if any – respect among people working in Slovakia’s relatively small and cohesive cultural community. On the heels of the protests, opposition MPs from PS, SaS and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) filed a petition to hold an extraordinary session of parliament with just one point on the programme: a no-confidence vote in the culture minister. The session is expected to take place this week.
How has this situation arisen, and what has the minister done to generate so much anger since last October, when she took over?
