Sme journalist Zuzana Kovačič Hanzelová. (source: SME - Jozef Jakubčo)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Hate speech is a real problem, the experience of a well-known Slovak journalist shows. The Constitutional Court delivers an unusually fast decision. Fico makes international headlines, and Czech protesters tell him to “go home to Russia”.
Last Week in Slovakia is taking a week-long break, I’ll be back in your inbox on March 18, just in time for the first round of the presidential election.
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If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
We need to talk about the media
There is a real danger that Slovakia may go down the Hungarian path, politicians and commentators started warning this time last year, as they entered the election campaign with Robert Fico’s Smer as the frontrunner in the polls.
Even as Smer won that election in September, the alarm sounded very worrying yet rather amorphous. It has taken Fico a matter of months to show exactly what his return means, and the events of the last week have cast it into even starker relief – testing the limits of the most fundamental legislative principles to the point that we are now asking whether the government will even observe a ruling by the Constitutional Court; calling Slovakia’s allies warmongers while reproaching them for “demonising” Vladimir Putin, a man who is prosecuting a war of quasi-mediaeval conquest (and has Slovakia on his list of enemies); and, as I will highlight today, systematically working towards dismantling the free media environment that Slovakia, unlike Hungary, is fortunate enough to still have.
To do that, the fourth government of Robert Fico does not even need to take major legislative steps – although it also has those in the pipeline, as Andrej Danko, the far-right nationalist leader who is Fico’s enthusiastic junior partner in government, keeps reminding us with his hints that he is looking to have a more-than-obedient public-service broadcaster.
The story of Zuzana Kovačič Hanzelová, my colleague from the Sme daily, shows how effective the weaponisation of hate, a time-tested tactic of populists, still is. There are few things that Smer knows better than how to wield it.
