The day before I arrived in Bratislava, Slovakia, to report on last year’s election, Vladimir Putin admitted his beloved Soviet Union made “a mistake” in 1968 when sending in tanks to crush Czechoslovakia’s liberal reforms. This unusual apology from a despot who has tried so hard to revive Moscow’s empire, rewrite history and defend even Stalin was a blatant attempt to assist his Slovakian stooge Robert Fico.
The Russian president, focused as ever on winkling open fissures in the West, saw the country as a weak link in the European Union and Nato. His regime had worked hard to hurt its fledgling democracy by dripping in poison from its disinformation factories.
Putin’s strategy paid off lavishly. Fico, the country’s most divisive figure, made an incredible return to power only five years after being forced from office amid public fury over the killing of a journalist investigating corruption and Italian Mafia links to his government.
Slovakia’s longest-serving prime minister – having reinvented himself as a hard-right populist spitting out conspiracy theories and pro-Russian propaganda on Ukraine – stopped military aid to Kyiv and allied with Hungary’s Viktor Orban to serve Moscow’s cause in the EU.
Then last week came the first attempted assassination of an elected leader on our continent for more than two decades, fanning the flames of fear in Western democracies. Putin must have been delighted as shockwaves flew around Europe. Symbolically, as the bullet-ridden leader was being rushed to hospital for life-saving surgery, he was kowtowing to brutal soulmates in Beijing in order to solidify support for slaughtering Ukrainians while overseeing a deal to unify China and Russia’s propaganda machines.
Fico’s shooting also took place as Slovakia’s parliament debated efforts to dismantle the public broadcaster amid a crackdown on “dirty anti-Slovak prostitutes” – the prime minister’s description of journalists. His sidekicks accused the media and opposition of having blood on their hands, although the “lone wolf” attacker’s motives were unclear. One talked of a “political war”.
Sensible politicians – both in Bratislava and beyond its borders – united to condemn the attempted killing. But as I wrote here last week, we should have no delusions: there is ongoing war between autocracy and democracy. Slovakia, like its war-torn neighbour, finds itself on the front line as Putin and his dictatorial pals try to destroy our values, divide our societies and achieve global hegemony.
Putin started to target the country with disinformation after his initial invasion of Ukraine a decade ago. Experts traced efforts to manipulate public opinion to Moscow, while local opportunists found they could earn substantial sums in “advertising” on websites spreading Kremlin hate and lies. One contributor to a key site was caught on camera being paid by a Russian defence attache.
Fico drove home his message with all the usual repulsive tactics from the populist playbook, such as targeting minorities and foreigners, while pledging to protect traditional values, restore political order, spend heavily on benefits and revive the economy. Once in office, he shut down the country’s anti-corruption agency and helped force out their first female president.
Civil rights lawyer Zuzana Caputova won the post in wake of the 2018 protests campaigning on the slogan “Stand up to evil” – but suffered death threats after Fico branded her a US agent. “Making someone a target with hateful lies has cost people’s lives already in Slovakia,” she responded as she sued him. She was the country’s most trusted politician and a strong supporter of Kyiv.
Her successor, elected last month, is a Fico ally who shares his stance on Ukraine. Another success for the Kremlin.
This post-communist country was bitterly divided, with people on all sides feeling betrayed by their leaders. And Fico – such a shameless character who had slid around the political spectrum from communism to centre-left pragmatism to nationalist extremism – was at the centre of all the fissures.
One Slovakian man told me he would leave the country if Fico returned. A woman in her thirties said she would not dare bring children into such a world. Zita, a retired lawyer in Fico’s home town of Topolcany, wept as she recalled the dark days of their Soviet past. “I want a better future for the next generation. But I am scared and terrified – Fico is a very bad man. I fear we will go back to the old ways. I fear that democracy, everything is in danger,” she told me. Sadly, her fears were valid.
Yet, Zita was unusual in this polarised nation since many pensioners, especially in such places, were nostalgic for the past amid the uncertainties of the present. They endured the collapse of communism, followed by the rip-tide of capitalism at its most rapacious along with grotesque corruption.
Then in recent years came a churn of prime ministers, a poorly handled pandemic, a frightening war next door, soaring energy costs and a sluggish economy in a country formerly called the “Tatra tiger” for its economic growth.
Those most likely to back Fico – and most susceptible to Russia’s malevolent messaging – tended to be from older generations and less prosperous backgrounds, while his most implacable foes were more likely to be younger citizens or members of the better-educated, wealthier and urban elites.
But as Putin knows, such divides and failures to come to terms with the past are far from unique in Western democracies. We saw the same in Britain over Brexit. We can see it from Washington to Warsaw. Politicians are pathetically tribal as they play self-serving games and ignore fundamental concerns of their country, while the curse of social media – so easily infected by malign foreign bodies – inflames the situation. Faith in politics declines. Rabble-rousing populists exploit valid concerns over globalisation, governance, inequality and public services.
As Caputova said, the attempted killing of their elected leader was an individual act “but the tense atmosphere of hatred was our collective work”. Her words should reverberate around every democracy.