NYT | May 16, 2024
Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia on a visit to Prague in February. Credit…Michal Cizek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, a fixture in the country’s politics and known for defying his fellow leaders in the European Union, underwent hours of emergency surgery on Wednesday after being shot five times and critically wounded in a town in central Slovakia, in what officials said appeared to be a politically motivated assassination attempt.
His deputy, Tomas Taraba, told the BBC that the operation appeared to have gone well. “I guess in the end he will survive,” he said.
The shooting was the most serious attack on a European leader in decades, drawing shock and condemnation from Slovak officials and other European leaders and stoking fears that Europe’s increasingly polarized and venomous political debates had tipped into violence.
The events were captured on videos, which showed Mr. Fico, 59, approaching a small group of people behind a waist-high metal barrier on a public square in the town of Handlova, when a man stepped forward and fired a pistol from just a few feet away. Five bangs could be heard.
With the first bang, Mr. Fico doubled over at the waist and fell backward onto a bench as more reports ring out. Security officers then hustled him into a black Audi several feet away, half-carrying him to the car’s rear door. He was taken to a local hospital and airlifted to another for surgery.
Security officers at the scene of the shooting wrestled a suspect to the ground, and officials said that initial evidence pointed to political motivations. The authorities did not identify the suspect, whom Slovak news outlets described as a 71-year-old poet. The country’s interior minister, Matus Sutaj Estok, said more information would be made public “in the coming days.”
The president of Slovakia, Zuzana Caputova, whose position is largely ceremonial, said in a statement, “The shooting of the prime minister is first and foremost an attack on a human being, but it’s also an attack on democracy.”
The shooting also drew a chorus of condemnation from world leaders, including President Biden, who called it a “horrific act of violence,” and Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, who lauded Mr. Fico as a “courageous and strong-minded man.”
Mr. Fico began his three-decade political career as a leftist but over the years shifted to the right, as did the party he founded, Smer. He served as prime minister from 2006 to 2010 and from 2012 to 2018, before returning to power in elections last year. After being ousted amid street protests in 2018, he was re-elected on a platform of social conservatism, nationalism and promises of generous welfare programs.
Mr. Fico presented himself as a pugnacious fighter for the common man and an enemy of liberal elites and immigration from outside Europe, and he aligned with Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, in opposing aid to Ukraine and challenging mainstream opinions within the European Union.
Domestically, his critics accused him of undermining the independence of the news media, opposed his efforts to restrict foreign funding of civic organizations and called him a threat to democracy. They also accused Mr. Fico of seeking to take Slovakia back to the repressive days of the Soviet bloc.
Here is what else to know:
- Mr. Fico was in Handlova to hold a governmental meeting, which he followed with a nearly hourlong news conference. He had just emerged from those events when he was attacked.
- The Parliament of Slovakia suspended its meetings and said it was “significantly” bolstering its security measures. Some of Mr. Fico’s parliamentary allies suggested that his liberal opponents had created the atmosphere for the shooting.
- Michal Simecka, the chair of the opposition party Progressive Slovakia, said he shared in the “horror” of the attack and stressed that the attacker was not a member of his movement or connected to his party in any way.
Pavol Strba and Gaya Gupta contributed reporting.
My first comment was a mistake and I apologize to him. I had misread. (A classic case of Emily Litella-itis” * ) He allowed someone in to his coalition who said that. My second comment is in moderation. It explains a lot from different sources as this above article does not and also lists two new films about the Shoah in Slovakia I knew nothing about. Heartening that one of them was cosponsored here by a Slovakian cultural society. Shocking that Slovakia was the only country TO PAY Nazi Germany to take away the Jews. But, he’s good on this issue even if he does the usual talking out of both sides of his mouth on the current conflict in Gaza, at once condemning Oct 7 and condemning Israel for defending itself.
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Emily Litella editorial replies on early SNL mock news show:
*”Violins on Television”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZLeaSWY37I
“Busting School Children”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQppLas38uI
” Slovakia was the only country during World War II that paid Germany to deport its Jewish citizens. After the passage of anti-Jewish legislation, Slovak fascist forces gathered nearly 60,000 Jews in ghettos and work camps, transported them to the border and into the hands of the Nazis, who murdered them in industrialized death camps. By the end of the war, the Nazis, Slovak fascists, and their collaborators had killed nearly 70 percent of the 85,950 Jews who had lived in Slovakia. Only a few thousand Jews live in Slovakia today.”
https://ysu.edu/news/movie-screening-exhibit-focus-holocaust-slovakia
“How many Jews live in Slovakia?
Core Jewish population of Slovakia: 2,600
Population with Jewish parents in Slovakia: 3,600
Enlarged Jewish population of Slovakia: 4,600
Law of Return Jewish population of Slovakia: 6,000”
https://www.jpr.org.uk/countries/how-many-jews-in-slovakia
“A new film details the incredible story of a winemaker who saved Jewish girls from the death grip of Auschwitz.”
https://aish.com/saving-the-jews-of-bardejov/
2 new films about shoah in Slovakia.
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“Wartime Slovak state hailed by far right, PM Fico laid wreath at Holocaust monument
On March 14 Slovakia marks the anniversary of the launch of the first independent Slovak state that was created with the backing of Nazi Germany.”
“That state, whose president was priest Josef Tiso, is known to have deported some 70,000 Jews to death camps and expropriated their property, then worth billions of Slovak crowns.
This year, on the occasion of the 77th anniversary of the first Slovak state’s founding, Prime Minister Rober Fico laid a wreath on the monument dedicated to Holocaust victims at Rybné Námestie square in Bratislava. It was not so much for the past as for the sake of the present and future that Fico came to pay his respects to the victims.
“Slovakia can be proud of many things,” said Fico as cited by the TASR newswire. “However, there’s one aspect we must never allow to be taken away from us because it’s a fundamental pillar of our statehood and that’s the resistance against fascism.”
Fico voiced his surprise over last week’s general election results seen in some Slovak villages including those in which citizens were killed during the Slovak National Uprising, like Ostrý Grú? in Banská Bystrica Region.
The far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia (?SNS) of Marian Kotleba scored 8.1 percent in the March 5 parliamentary elections.
“If the party, whose representative [MP Marian Magat] claims that Hitler was more or less an okay guy and the Holocaust was a hoax, manages to garner almost one-fifth of votes in a village such as Ostrý Grú?… then we should all be on high alert,” Fico said. “The village that was burned down and stands as a symbol of the atrocities committed by fascism.”
Prime Minister Fico stressed that both he and his party will utilise all democratic means at their disposal to prevent such things from reoccurring. Prime Minister Fico stressed that both he and his party will utilise all democratic means at their disposal to prevent such things from reoccurring. He recommended anyone who casts doubt over the Holocaust and mass extermination of peoples to pay a visit to at least one former concentration camp.
“They stand as a memento of the atrocities committed by fascism,” he added.
Far right MPs at Jozef Tiso’s grave
On the same day three newly elected members of parliament for ?SNS paid their respects to Slovak state (1939-45) president Jozef Tiso – a priest – on the occasion of the 77th anniversary of its establishment, TV Markíza reported on its website.
Three ?SNS MPs – Martin Beluský, Natália Grausová and Peter Krupa – commemorated this historical period right at Tiso’s grave at the Martinský cemetery in the Bratislava borough of Ružinov. These legislators did not want to comment on this, reported TV Markíza. ”
?ítajte viac: https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20116919/wartime-slovak-state-hailed-by-far-right-pm-fico-laid-wreath-at-holocaust-monument.html
HIs politics are all over the place. On Israel:
“rael
In October 2023, he condemned the Hamas-led attack on Israel, but rejected “considerations of razing the Gaza Strip to the ground or denying humanitarian aid in this area.”[111] In December 2023, Fico criticized the “hypocrisy” of the EU, which was reluctant to talk about the high civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip.[112]”
Wikipedia gives a fairly detailed picture of his politics and career which is more than you can say for the above article.
He’s certainly not above bigotry though at least he’s not an antisemite. The far right wing party he defeated are Holocaust denying Nazi sympathizers. What was that Trump said about “shithole countries”
?ítajte viac: https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20116919/wartime-slovak-state-hailed-by-far-right-pm-fico-laid-wreath-at-holocaust-monument.html
“Slota was known for his fierce anti-Hungarian rhetoric, including that “Hungarians are a tumor on the Slovak nation that needs to be immediately removed.”
Charming fellow.