Suspect Is Charged in Attempted Killing of Slovakia’s Leader (2024)

Pinned

Here are the latest developments.

The authorities have not named the suspect, who Slovakian news media outlets described as a 71-year-old amateur poet. But the shooting on Wednesday immediately raised political tempers in the Central European nation, which was already sharply divided between supporters of Mr. Fico (pronounced FEET-soh), who back his right-wing nationalist and anti-immigration policies, and opponents who accuse him of destroying democracy.

As the prime minister’s allies accused opponents of having “blood on their hands,” officials were urging political parties and the public to reject escalatory rhetoric and hatred. Echoing other politicians, the president-elect, Peter Pellegrini — an ally of Mr. Fico’s who was elected last month — said that “Slovakia must walk on the path of peace, not reply to hatred with hatred.”

Mr. Pellegrini called on all Slovak political parties to temporarily pause their campaigns for next month’s European Parliament elections.

Here’s what else to know:

• Mr. Fico, a combative, shape-shifting veteran politician widely loathed by Bratislava liberals but popular outside the capital, was shot multiple times on Wednesday, taking at least one bullet in his abdomen. The shooting occurred after meetings with local officials and supporters in Handlova, a town in central Slovakia that voted heavily for his party in a September parliamentary election.

• Slovakia’s political temperature has risen to fever pitch in recent months as Mr. Fico’s government, in power since a tight September election, has pushed for an overhaul of the country’s state broadcasting system to purge what it sees as liberal bias. Critics have accused Mr. Fico of trying to take Slovakia back to the repression of the country’s communist past before the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

• Amid criticism of how Mr. Fico’s security detail responded to the assassination attempt, the police said they had opened an inquiry into the response of security officials at the scene.

Sara Cincurova contributed reporting.

Slovak officials call the shooting suspect a ‘lone wolf’ who had recently been radicalized.

“The perpetrator was not a member of any radicalized group,” Mr. Estok said. “The only group he was a member of was the association of Slovak writers. He was not left or right — he was interested in politics, that’s all.”

Mr. Estok said that the suspect had expressed antigovernment sentiments, including attending protests over the last year, but had been “radicalized recently, after the presidential election.”

Voters in April chose Peter Pellegrini, an ally of Mr. Fico who opposes providing military and financial aid to Ukraine, in a runoff vote for the presidency. Despite the presidency’s limited powers in Slovakia, the election was widely watched as a test of strength between political camps with starkly different views on Russia.

The suspect did not “agree with current politics,” Mr. Estok said.

Sara Cincurova contributed reporting.

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Calls to pause Slovakia’s E.U. election campaigning raise questions about how that could affect voting.

The local news media reported that another party, the Christian Democratic Movement, had also paused campaigning.

It is not clear how long such suspensions would last or what that would mean for Slovakia’s participation in the E.U. elections, which happen every five years. Voters across the European Union will elect 720 European Parliament representatives, with polling scheduled to take place in all 27 of the bloc’s members from June 6 to 9. Slovak voters are set to cast their ballots on June 8.

Candidates for E.U. elections come mostly from established national parties, so voters tend to be familiar with their agendas. A temporary suspension in campaigning would therefore not necessarily affect Slovakian voters’ ability to decide whom they support, provided that campaigning does resume and that elections are held as planned.

Officials at the European Parliament and the European Commission did not respond to requests for comment on the calls to suspend campaigning and whether it could have an impact on the bloc’s voting.

National electoral authorities are responsible for handling the voting, and the results are managed locally. The number of members of the European Parliament each country gets to elect depends on the country’s population size. The largest, Germany, gets the most lawmakers — 96 in total. Slovakia, significantly smaller, will elect 15 members of the European Parliament.

Slovakia’s officials appeal for calm in a deeply polarized country.

Officials have not identified the assailant, but they said the attack appeared to be politically motivated. The suspect, who was identified as a “lone wolf,” has been charged with premeditated murder.

On Thursday, Zuzana Caputova, the country’s departing president, stressed that the attack was an “individual act” and said she would invite leaders from Slovakia’s main political parties to meet in order to “calm down the situation.”

“We have difference of opinions, but let’s not spread hatred,” she said in a statement alongside the president-elect, Peter Pellegrini.

Mr. Pellegrini echoed her appeal to tone down escalatory rhetoric while also calling on the country’s political parties to temporarily pause or “calm down” their campaigns for next month’s European Parliament elections. Campaigns, he told a news conference, naturally involve confrontations and “strong opinions.”

“We do not need more confrontation,” he said, adding that “civilized discussion” was critical before the polls.

Amid questions about the response of Slovak security forces to the shooting, Michal Simecka, the chair of the opposition Progressive Slovakia party, expressed confidence that the authorities would carry out “a thorough investigation of their actions.”

“Instead of blaming each other, today we especially need to reduce tension and polarization in society, create space for the investigation of this terrible act,” he wrote on social media.

He later welcomed Mr. Pellegrini’s suggestion of pausing campaigning for the European Parliament elections, saying that his party had done so and would do everything it can to help “calm the situation” in Slovakia.

The police, who had asked news outlets and social media users to turn off comments on articles and posts about the attack, said they were monitoring online activity. Some comments have condoned the violence against Mr. Fico, the police said on Facebook on Thursday, adding that if police action were needed, it would be taken.

Slovakia’s often venomous divisions have been fed by its particularly noxious online ecosphere, where politicians have gained large followings with intemperate attacks on domestic critics and Western leaders.

Mr. Fico returned to the premiership last year, defying expectations after his Smer party narrowly won a bitterly contested legislative election.

After the shooting, politicians across the political spectrum pointed fingers at one another. Lubos Blaha, the vice chairman of Smer, said the opposition and what he called “the liberal media” had “built a gallows” for the prime minister by “spreading so much hatred.” Rudolf Huliak, an ally of the government from the far-right Slovak National Party, said progressives and journalists “have Robert Fico’s blood on their hands.”

Slovakia’s political temperature has risen to fever pitch in recent months as Mr. Fico’s government has pushed for an overhaul of the country’s state broadcasting system to purge what it sees as liberal bias and crack down on nongovernmental organizations it views as agents of foreign meddling.

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When asked whether Fico was conscious, Kalinak said that the prime minister remained in serious condition and had a “limited” ability to communicate.

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Pellegrini echoed that sentiment, saying, “Slovakia must walk on the path of peace, not reply to hatred with hatred.” “We do not need more confrontation,” he said, adding that “civilized discussion” was critical, especially given the looming European Union elections.

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Who is Robert Fico?

Mr. Fico, who had been a Communist Party member while it was in power, founded the Smer party in the late 1990s. He began the first of his three terms as prime minister in 2006, serving for four years before going into opposition after his coalition lost an election. Mr. Fico returned to power in 2012 but resigned as prime minister in July 2018 following mass demonstrations over the murder of a journalist, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, who had been uncovering government corruption. The protests, which rocked the country, were the largest seen since the Velvet Revolution; demonstrators demanded the resignation of the government and new elections.

Slovakia ranks high in independent assessments of press freedom, but the protesters had also sought deeper changes in the country Mr. Fico had overseen.

The Smer party started out on the political left but has increasingly embraced right-wing views on immigration and cultural issues. Much of the international discussion of Mr. Fico’s leadership in recent years has focused on his ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Slovakia’s southern neighbor. Like Mr. Orban, Mr. Fico has been a staunch critic of the European Union.

After a parliamentary election last fall, Mr. Fico began his third term as prime minister, then had heart surgery the next month. He emerged to form a coalition government after securing around 23 percent of the vote, having campaigned against sanctions that were imposed on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Not one round of the country’s ammunition should be sent to Ukraine, he had told voters.

That stance, in a country where pro-Russian sentiment had historically been significant, worried E.U. leaders in Brussels, who said they feared that Slovakia could form a pro-Russian alliance with Mr. Orban and, potentially, Italy’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, that would impede support for Ukraine in the European Union. At the time, it was also seen as a sign of the apparent erosion of the pro-Ukrainian bloc that Europe had formed after the invasion.

Slovakia’s military contributions to Ukraine were negligible compared with countries such as the United States and Britain. But last year it became one of several European Union countries on Ukraine’s borders to block imports of its grain, fearing that it could undermine Slovakia’s farmers.

In April, an ally of Mr. Fico, Peter Pellegrini, won a vote to become Slovakia’s president. The position is largely ceremonial, but analysts said the victory strengthened the grip of political forces friendly to Russia in Central Europe, given that Mr. Pellegrini opposed providing military and financial aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Fico was born on Sept. 15, 1964, into a working-class family in the city of Topolcany in the Nitra Region of what is now Slovakia. He graduated in 1986 from Comenius University Bratislava, where he received a law degree, according to the Slovak government’s website. He earned a doctorate at the Institute of State and Law at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and served in the military from 1986 to 1987.

Mr. Fico studied in the United States, Britain, Finland, Belgium and France, specializing in human rights and criminal law, according to the government website. He married Svetlana Ficova, a lawyer and professor, and they have a son. News reports in Slovakia say the couple is separated.