Robert Fico speaks during a press conference at the Slovak Representation in Brussels on Jan. 9, 2025. (source: Virginia Mayo, TASR/AP )
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. The land registry is out of order, paralysing banks, municipalities and others. Prime Minister Robert Fico is always ready to yell and threaten to retaliate against Ukraine, as he has shown in Brussels and in Bratislava. The demolition of cultural institutions continues – now they've come for the literary institute. People express shame at Fico's actions via massive demos around Slovakia.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
Who is waging hybrid war here?
Slovakia has spent the last week dealing with the aftermath of a sudden event with potentially far-reaching consequences on the national economy. Despite the best efforts of the prime minister and several of his ministers to convince Slovakia's population otherwise, that event was not Ukraine's long-signalled decision to stop allowing Russian gas from flowing across its territory from January 1.
Instead, it was a far more direct strike to the functioning of the state. When the public officials who issue property ownership certificates at the government’s client-service centres returned from their Christmas break on Tuesday, they were told to not even turn on their computers. Rumours, later confirmed, suggested that the country’s land registry was under a ransomware attack. Hackers have reportedly hijacked the data of the land registry and are demanding a ransom of millions of euros to restore it.
Initially, top government officials acted as if that was no major concern – even though banks could not release funds for approved mortgages, municipalities could not register residents or issue parking passes, and monument protection offices could not issue construction permits, among other things. By Wednesday, people started wondering whether they could safely count on being able to prove ownership of their own homes in the event that the cadastral office's data cannot be restored to its most up-to-date version from before the attack.
By the time the government’s security council convened on Friday morning – it would later issue a vague assurance that the data was safe and the land registry website as well as cadastral offices would gradually start working after the weekend – significant public panic had built up.
