THE SHOOTING OF FICO: POETIC JUSTICE IN A LAND WHERE PEOPLE STILL PONDER THEIR SHOES?
Slovakia has stood at Europe’s battered political crossroads for centuries.
It is still a former battleground where pondering your shoes as you walk down the street can be seen as a major key to survival.
Memories of secret police, murderous invasion and the Velvet Revolution die hard for many in the ‘little big country’.
Keep your heads down boys, unless you want to get them shot off.
And when Robert Fico – a man I knew from a distance for a decade – was shot full of holes by an angry old poet, the windows of the free world rattled.
And history repeated itself.
It is less than forty years ago that Slovakia grabbed its independence from the jaws of the Great Warsaw Bear and opted to stand up for itself.
But then Russia went to war on the Ukraine, setting up camp on Slovakia’s border.
Suddenly the ‘little big country’ had become a frontline state of importance. And the return to power of Fico as Slovak prime minister last October changed everything again.
Fico is almost a clone of his political ally Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary – both attack the West for supporting Kyiv.
And Fico even ran a pro-Putin, anti-American and anti-EU campaign as part of his re-election campaign.
And his hardline on immigrants, his obsession with EU subsidies, his dislike of gay people, and his appeasing attitude towards Putin have played well with his voters.
But not in the West.
People either like him or want to put a bullet in him.
The last time we bumped into each other was at a luxury car dealership in Kosice, a city to the east of the country where we lived for many years. He was ebullient and macho, smiley and wavy.
But there was a darkness in his eyes and a street-wise thuggish-ness in his demeanour.
We passed the time of day surrounded by luxury cars and smiled at each other a lot. He is a man with a smattering of head-butt charm and smarmy jovial words.
Then we went our seperate ways.
The alleged gunman has been identified as Juraj C, a 71-year-old poet from Levice, south-central Slovakia, who has long desired a new political movement, preferably led by himself.
He told police that he shot Fico because he wanted to stop government policies destroying the media.
But whatever the motives of yesterday's would-be assassin, a European head of government has been gunned down in public.
On the street.
Ľuboš Blaha, a lawyer with Fico’s party, blames Fico’s critics for the attack.
“You, the liberal media, and progressive politicians are to blame. Robert Fico is fighting for his life because of your hatred,” said Blaha.
Peter Pellegrini, Slovakia’s president-elect and an ally of Fico, described the incident as an “unprecedented threat” to Slovakian democracy.
And its ramifications could well be far more damaging as Putin puffs out his war chest like a belligerent pigeon and people like Fico and Orban flap their tattered wings to protect him.
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