Slovakia’s Leader Survives Surgery After Shooting, Deputy Says (2024)

Pinned

A suspect is in custody in the Slovakia shooting. Here’s what to know.

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.

Slovakia has largely charted its own course since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Czechoslovakia was a multiethnic nation established at the end of World War I that endured dismemberment by the Nazis and more than four decades of Communist rule. But during the fall of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when independence movements gained strength throughout the Soviet Union, a series of largely peaceful protests called the Velvet Revolution led Czechoslovakia first to independence and then to a split, often referred to as the Velvet Divorce, that left two nations: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

After several years of economic and political upheaval following its independence, Slovakia joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, and adopted the euro in 2009. As the country navigated the establishment of its national identity, some tensions remained with the Czech Republic, its richer and larger neighbor, which has roughly twice Slovakia’s population of five million.

Like much of Europe, Slovakia has been deeply polarized over the past decade. Mr. Fico, who has been a leading politician in the country since its independence, was forced to resign from office in 2018 amid sweeping protests over the murder of a journalist who was investigating government corruption.

He was re-elected last fall, after taking a pro-Russian campaign stance that capitalized on Slovakia’s historical Russian sympathies.

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The prime minister was shot five times, he said.

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Fico campaigned on ending support for Ukraine, alarming many in the West.

A public opinion poll in March 2023 found that 51 percent of Slovaks believed that either the West or Ukraine were “primarily responsible” for the war. Mr. Fico capitalized on the sentiment, campaigning on stopping all arms shipments to Ukraine while blaming Russia and Ukraine equally for the war.

In October, Mr. Fico said he was halting all military aid to Ukraine, though he said nonmilitary aid would continue. The decision was met with outrage among other E.U. members and supporters of Ukraine.

Mr. Fico, who was prime minister for a decade before resigning in 2018, has aligned himself rhetorically with Viktor Orban, the pro-Russian leader of neighboring Hungary.

“Fico was inspired by Orban, but does not have the same deep ideological roots, and is more of a pragmatist,” Ludek Sekyra, a Czech businessman who chairs the Sekyra Foundation, a supporter of liberal causes, said in October. “He has been adept in exploiting unease over the vast influx of Ukrainian refugees, small-country resentment of the European Union and Russian sympathies that do not exist in the Czech Republic.”

Though he won the election, he remains reviled by many voters outside his party’s loyal base. His party, Smer, is nominally leftist but has moved to the right on immigration and cultural issues.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called Mr. Fico a “courageous and strong-minded man,” adding that this “monstrous crime cannot have any justification.”

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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.

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Peter Pellegrini, who will soon assume the Slovak presidency, echoed that sentiment. “An assassination attempt on one of the highest constitutional officials is an unprecedented threat to Slovak democracy,” he wrote on social media. “If we express different political opinions with guns in the squares, and not in polling stations, we endanger everything we have built together in 31 years of Slovak sovereignty.”

He was taken there because it would have taken too long to get to the capital, Bratislava, according to his official Facebook page.

World leaders express shock at an assassination attempt against Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, called the attack “vile” on social media. “Such acts of violence have no place in our society and undermine democracy, our most precious common good,” she added.

Charles Michel of the European Council, the other major European Union institution, expressed shock on social media and wrote, “Nothing can ever justify violence or such attacks.”

Mr. Fico has had a testy relationship with European Union partners, expressing pro-Russian views and at times siding with Hungary, the bloc’s closest Russian ally. Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary and Mr. Fico’s personal ally, said he was “deeply shocked by the heinous attack against my friend, Prime Minister Robert Fico.”

But such conflicts were put firmly aside as European leaders grappled with the attack against Mr. Fico, which has come just weeks before a major European Union-wide election is to be held between June 6 and 9.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said that he was “shocked” by the shooting. “I strongly condemn this attack,” he wrote on X. “My thoughts and solidarity are with him, his family and the Slovak people.”

António Guterres, the U. N. secretary general, strongly condemned the “shocking attack” against Mr. Fico, according to a statement from his spokesperson’s office, adding that his thoughts were with the prime minister and his loved ones.

Violent attacks, especially shootings, against elected officials have been extremely rare in recent European history.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine also took to social media to voice shock at the assassination attempt against Mr. Fico. While Slovakia’s support for Ukraine has waned recently, it was the first country to deliver fighter jets there when its war began.

“We strongly condemn this act of violence against our neighboring partner state’s head of government,” wrote Mr. Zelensky. “Every effort should be made to ensure that violence does not become the norm in any country, form, or sphere,” he said.

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