Robert Fico embraces Agriculture Minister Richard Takac as he arrives to Handlova. (source: Jozef Jakubčo, SME)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Fico’s Smer party marked the anniversary of the assassination attempt with some heavy-handed campaigning in Handlová. Police pressed formal charges against an oppositi§on party activist – immediately after Smer politicians had publicly accused him. The state broadcaster gets its first permanent director: the daughter of a late propagandist for Mečiar and Fico. The mayor of Bratislava-Petržalka steps down after an employee is found to have siphoned off €2.5 million without him noticing.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
How Fico marked one year since the shooting
We need to take stock of the state of hate in our society, said the prime minister and his fellow Smer politicians ahead of Thursday, May 15. They planned an event in Handlová, the small central-Slovak mining town where Robert Fico had been shot in an assassination attempt exactly one year earlier. They called the event ‘Enough of Hate’.
What unfolded turned out to be a throwback to the days and weeks that followed the shooting, when Fico was fighting for his life in hospital, then recovering from his injuries. Back then, coalition politicians from Smer and its two junior coalition partners, Hlas and the Slovak National Party (SNS), called on the public to put an end to hateful comments – but paid most attention to those that were directed against their own politicians. All the while, they pointed fingers at the opposition as well as the independent media, accusing them of spreading hate that had eventually, as they saw it, led to the attempt on the prime minister’s life.
A year on from the attack, Smer – now without the involvement of its coalition partners – decided the anniversary was a good moment to revisit that rhetoric, with a renewed urgency that was meant to communicate to the public that another attack against a government representative is imminent. To accentuate the point, the prime minister convened a session of the government’s Security Council, with the general prosecutor and the intelligence service director in attendance, to discuss – so far as we can tell – online and offline hate in the society.
A campaign through and through
A rare bit of information that the public learned afterwards – during a press conference held at the Government Office, but featuring Smer MPs Tibor Gašpar and Richard Glück alongside Fico’s chief of staff Juraj Gedra – was that online hate has increased by a peculiarly specific 239 percent in the year since the attack on Fico. The methodology or factual basis for this claim was not revealed.
It quickly became apparent that the Security Council session and the cabinet session held in Handlová later that day was part of a campaign that would culminate in a public event at the local sports hall, where hundreds of Smer supporters flocked, brought in by buses from different parts of the country.
