Robert Fico returned to work - he inspected the crops on July 8. (source: SME - Marko Erd)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Fico is back and seems set on deepening the political divide. Weather-related injuries at Pohoda are another reminder of how climate change also affects life in central Europe. A Slovak delegation led by President Pellegrini assents to the conclusions of the Washington NATO summit.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
Talk of reconciliation, and yet…
Politicians across the Slovak political spectrum condemned Saturday’s gun attack in Pennsylvania against former American President Donald Trump immediately after news of it reached Slovakia. This replicated their horrified reactions to a similar incident two months ago, rather closer to home, when Prime Minister Robert Fico was severely injured in a failed assassination attempt by a pensioner in the central-Slovak town of Handlová.
But if one were to listen only to what Robert Fico has been saying over the past ten days, as he has gradually returned to his prime-ministerial duties, one might easily get the impression that the rejection of violence as a political tool is not as all-encompassing as it actually is.
One need only scroll back to Fico’s Facebook post earlier today, in which he wastes no time on the words “condemn the violence”, and went straight to stating that he regarded the attack on Trump to be a mirror-image – or, in his words, “a copy-paste scenario” – of the attack that he himself had suffered.
He then goes on to state that if the gunman who attacked Trump spoke Slovak, “all he would have needed in order to ‘set things straight’ with the disobedient former US president would have been to read Denník N, Sme or Aktuality”. This rather tortured analysis refers to the leading independent news sources in Slovakia, whose critical reporting on Fico’s government the premier chooses to interpret as personal attacks on himself, and by extension the country. The Slovak Spectator is part of the same publishing house as Sme.
