Robert Fico and Shavkat Mirziyoyev in Uzbekistan. (source: TASR)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Fico had a good time in Central Asia, and wouldn't mind importing its political regime as well as some of its workers. The Constitution faces a worrying, major amendment – some opposition politicians are already on board. Justice Minister Susko scraps another corruption plea deal using his new powers.
Reporting from the Eastern Frontier: Despite the generalisations that have informed the attitudes of western partners for nearly two decades since the big-bang enlargement of the EU in 2004, countries on the EU’s eastern frontier are hardly a monolithic bloc. There are vast differences in their historical experiences, their respective roles in the region, as well as the different shape that post-communist transformation took in different parts of Europe’s East. Leafing through the pages of the 2025 edition of The Eastern Frontier Initiative Threat Report, which you can download as a PDF here, the attentive reader will very quickly understand how these differences are reflected in the ways each nation chooses to remember its history and how resilient (or not) they are in the face of the intense hybrid aggression that all of them have been experiencing over the past decade.
The Threat Report is the result of cooperation of journalists within The Eastern Frontier Initiative (TEFI) from Slovakia’s Sme daily, Hungary’s 444 platform, Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, Romania’s Press One, and Bellingcat.
What Fico said, and why it matters where he said it
The early June visit to Italy, where Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico met his Italian counterpart, Georgia Meloni, could have served Smer’s leader as part of a balancing act – but it was so brief as to pass virtually unnoticed.
The purely chronological coincidence might have seemed compelling, at least to casual observers: in late May, President Peter Pellegrini in his first annual state-of-the-nation speech to parliament, urges Fico to look to “all four sides” – the phrasing Fico uses to legitimise his friendly approach towards Russia, China and Africa – but to not forget that Slovakia’s economic and physical security is very much anchored in the west; just days later, Fico, who has seemed to positively relish meeting Putin and his ilk, takes off for Rome.
Such an impression, implying a willingness to heed the advice of the president, would have been wholly misleading. Last week, during a visit to Central Asia, the prime minister erased for such casual observers all remaining doubts about his real orientation.
Indeed, he felt so relaxed that he began positively gushing with praise and admiration for his friends in Tashkent (and Astana; he also landed in Kazakhstan), whom he acclaimed as a source of inspiration. He did so at the very moment that parliament in Bratislava is poised to debate a major amendment to the Slovak Constitution that may end up changing the electoral rules as well as introducing a new use for what Fico calls “national identity”.
