Is Slovakia the new Hungary? The thousands of protesters who took to the capital's National Uprising Square this month are surely worried that their country is rapidly moving in an illiberal direction, Politico reported.
"Under the leadership of [Prime Minister Robert] Fizzo, we are worried about our European future," said Sebastian, a 17-year-old IT student holding an EU flag.
For two nights in a row, protesters - many of them young people - chanted "truth" and "thank you" to representatives of cultural institutions that have borne the brunt of the government's latest actions.
The demonstrators, who included opposition politicians, journalists and nonprofit workers, gathered to protest the government's crackdown on the cultural sector, as well as other reforms they say will reverse the country's efforts to fight against corruption.
They also fear that under Fico, who campaigned to return to power on a pro-Russian and anti-American platform, their country is on the verge of becoming an illiberal state along the lines of Viktor Orbán's Hungary.
The protests were the first since the attempted assassination of Fico in May.
The prime minister, who blamed a "Slovak opposition activist" for the assassination attempt, was shot at close range with four bullets in Handlova, central Slovakia. The 59-year-old leader suffered life-threatening injuries in the abdomen and underwent several surgeries.
Fico said he was targeted for his refusal to provide military aid to Ukraine and his promotion of a "sovereign and assertive Slovak foreign policy".
The Slovak prime minister made his first public appearance since the assassination attempt on him in July; now the protests against his rule have also resumed. Crowds in National Uprising Square called him out for his government's divisive reforms to the judiciary and police institutions - and for targeting the media and cultural sector.
Thousands of people also called for the resignation of Culture Minister Martina Šimkovićova, a former host of the disinformation channel Slovan on the Internet TV, who recently fired senior officials at the country's largest arts institutions.
Šimković also cut funding to independent cultural institutions and turned the country's national broadcaster RTVS into a new structure under political control.
Similar crackdowns on the media and the judiciary are familiar from steps taken by Hungary or Poland in recent years, although Poland has corrected its illiberal course since the election last year of Donald Tusk's pro-European government.
Similar trends are also observed in Italy with the media policy of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, as well as in Bulgaria with its new law against the LGBTI community.
"This government is trying to cut Slovakia off from the free world, it is getting together with isolated countries and politicians [like Orbán]," said Ivan Korčok, the pro-Western candidate who lost to Fico's ally Peter Pellegrini in this year's presidential election.
In the latest repression of the ruling coalition against the cultural sector, the government fired the director of the National Theater, Matej Durlichka, and the art critic Alexandra Kusa, who was the director of the National Gallery for 12 years. Kusa stated that she was not given reasons for her demotion to the position of curator.
Fico's Smer party claimed the reason for her demotion was clear.
"Finally someone has the guts to show these neoliberal clowns pretending to be artists that the Slovak government is not obliged to support their progressive mafias, but instead the government will pursue a sovereign policy and support true national art," Luboš said Blaha, member of the European Parliament from Smer. | BGNES
