According to the latest reports, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, the victim of an assassination attempt on May 15, remains in “serious” but stable condition, and was able to speak a little to President-elect Peter Pellegrini who said in a press conference that he had visited him, Reuters reported. But whether he will recover and how long this might take are unknown at this point. He had five hours of surgery originally, and had to undergo a second one to deal with complications from four gunshot wounds.
At the same press conference, Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok said that assailant, the 71-year-old former security guard Juraj Cintula, has been charged with attempted murder and had acted alone, but had participated in previous anti-government demonstrations. “This is a lone wolf who had radicalized himself in the latest period after the presidential election,” he said. The “lone wolf” explanation has been used to explain many assassination attempts which had nothing to do with either “lone” or “wolf.” What emerges from the investigation remains to be seen.
London’s The Economist meanwhile is certain that if Fico hadn’t been such an “extraordinarily divisive figure,” the attempt might not have happened. He has turned Slovakia into “a mirror of Mr. Orbán’s illiberal regime” in Hungary, has shut down the anti-corruption authority and proposed a law to eliminate Slovakia’s independent broadcaster. He is now proposing a law, similar to the one just passed in Georgia, stipulating that any NGO receiving more than $5,400 in foreign funds would have to register as a foreign agent.
“The law seems clearly modelled on measures that Russia and Hungary have used to hamper independent groups,” The Economist ominously warns. It quotes Milan Nic, a Slovakian analyst with the German Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, hardly a bastion of democracy, who charges that in the “vicious political atmosphere” that Fico has created with his “extreme” positions, assassination attempts “could happen to anybody.” Nic told The Guardian that lame duck President Zuzana Caputova didn’t run for reelection because she had received death threats. “This cannot be seen as an isolated incident. The genie is out of the bottle,” he warned.
