Editor
Change of course
After surviving the intolerant reign of Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar within the Nineties, Slovakia elected a pro-Western authorities in 1998, placing itself again on observe for NATO and EU membership, which it secured in 2002 and 2004 respectively.
But after eight years of relentless reforms and creeping corruption, the voters turned in 2006 to Fico, a social democrat. Apart from a brief interval out of energy in 2010-2012, the pragmatic Fico ruled the nation for 12 years as a mainstream EU chief.
In 2018, nonetheless, Fico was pushed from workplace amid the most important protests because the nation’s 1993 independence. Demonstrators took to the streets of their tens of 1000’s to protest the homicide of journalist Ján Kuciak and his accomplice Martina Kušnírová, and to name on the cupboard to resign. Kuciak had been investigating ties between Fico’s authorities and Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta mafia.
But after one other interregnum that includes one other fractious center-right authorities, Fico returned to energy in 2023 on the energy of a pro-Russia, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-EU marketing campaign, topped with a refusal to ship weapons to Ukraine.
“There could be very little doubt in most European capitals that Fico is pursuing an agenda that’s at odds with the EU’s core worth of the rule of regulation,” mentioned Anton Spisak, a Slovak tutorial on the Centre for European Reform suppose tank.
In March, Fico ordered the closure of a particular prosecutor’s workplace that had handled the nation’s most critical corruption and arranged crime circumstances, plenty of them involving politicians and enterprise allies related to Smer.
