Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has turned up the heat on European leaders this week. In a post on X, Fico published his statements to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz during their phone call. “Above all, I briefed him on my lengthy discussion with U.S. President D. Trump and his Secretary of State M. Rubio, which took place on Saturday evening in Florida. The President of the United States is clearly pursuing the nation state interests of the U.S. If the EU acted in the same way, we would be in a completely different position than we are now. World leaders do not take the EU fully seriously, and this can be attributed to our nonsensical climate targets and our suicidal migration policy.”
Fico was even harsher in a letter he sent to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, which he also posted on X. Fico began by saying that Europe is not doing well during the current “era of gross violations of international law and the collapse of the world order,” and pointed directly to the issue of Europe’s “competitiveness.” “The future of the European Union depends very much on whether we will dogmatically insist on insufficiently considered ambitious climate targets that destroy the strategic European industry,” he went on. He pointed to the case of the Slovakian-Norwegian aluminum company Slovalco, jsc., which produced 10% of the total primary aluminum in the EU, until it was shut down in 2023 due to high electricity prices. Due to its advanced techniques, this company was able to produce aluminum using only one-fifth of the carbon emissions as the foreign companies from which Europe now imports aluminum. Fico called for a four- to five-year suspension on the application of the EU’s carbon emissions trading mechanism, saying the situation is “more critical than it may appear in Brussels.”
