BRUSSELS (news agencies) — In an increasingly vitriolic political climate, the last thing needed in the runup to the June European Union elections was an assassination attempt on one of the bloc’s most controversial figures.
As Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico lay recovering from Wednesday’s attack, the sheer violence of five shots targeted at a politician merely for doing his job immediately had a whole continent worried ahead of the June 6-9 polls.
Across the 27-nation EU, the political landscape is becoming increasingly polarized, with no holds barred between mainstream parties on the one hand and the bellicose populists and extremists on the other.
“It is shocking to see that someone can become the victim of his political ideas. Three weeks ahead of the elections, that is extremely alarming,” said Prime Minister Alexander De Croo of Belgium, which holds the EU presidency.
“Let’s make it an intense campaign when it comes to words, but not beyond that,” De Croo told the regional broadcaster VRT. Underscoring the seriousness of the issue, De Croo filed a police complaint Thursday against a broadcaster at a local event who called, apparently in jest, for the prime minister “to be shot.”
Such incidents are no laughing matter. In Germany last week, a prominent Berlin politician was violently assaulted and suffered injuries to her head and neck. A week earlier, a candidate from the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz was beaten up while campaigning for next month’s election for the European Parliament and had to undergo surgery.
The politics of compromise laid the foundations for Europe’s famed welfare society, but in recent years, aggressive discourse and unbridled partisanship have been on the rise.
“There was dialogue and with political plodding, solutions emerged. But now, all too often, that doesn’t work anymore,” said Prof. Hendrik Vos of Ghent University.
Slovakia is a case in point. Fico’s mastery of confrontational politics brought him back from the political wilderness and helped secure him a third term in office.
Fico campaigned on a pro-Russian, anti-American platform, a foreign policy liberated from its EU links, a tougher stance on migration and opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.
After he returned to power last year, he immediately set about dismantling the office of the anti-corruption prosecutor and bringing the public broadcaster, RTVS, under tighter government control. However, concerns in the EU about democratic backsliding and the rule of law have now been overtaken by events on the ground.
“Fico’s politics may be a threat to democracy, but this kind of violence in European politics is a much bigger threat,” political scientist Tom Theuns, of Leiden University, told media.
“In this period of polarization at European level, we see that the quality of democratic discourse has gone backward and politicians are increasingly depicted as enemies, both by other politicians and by the general public,” Theuns said. “Such discourse to increasingly see each other as ‘enemies’ legitimizes violence in the eyes of those who could possibly use it.”
As Fico lay in hospital, outgoing President Zuzana Caputova, one of his staunchest opponents, pleaded to “step out of the vicious circle of hatred and mutual accusations.” Caputova acknowledged that “the tense atmosphere of hatred was our collective work.”
Even Fico himself was predicting that the blaze would rage out of control: on April 10, he posted on Facebook that he would expect a slaying of a leading politician and blamed the media, long a target of his ire.
In 2018, he stepped down amid mass street protests after an investigative journalist who had been reporting on tax-related crimes implicating some in Fico’s party, was murdered, along with his fiancée.
It is too early to say what impact, if any, the attack on Fico would have on the EU elections, since they are highly compartmentalized in 27 separate polls in the member states.
In Slovakia, though, the effect is likely to be felt, predicted Juraj Majcin, analyst at the European Policy Center think tank in Brussels.
The attack “certainly won’t help the less extreme parties,” he said, adding that the “chances are that the people will be more motivated to go and vote for people like Fico.”
Even if Fico and his Smer party do well in the elections, their influence in the European Parliament is limited: his tiny parliamentary fraction has even been suspended by the socialist group. Fico himself wields more influence at the summits of EU leaders, where often he can threaten to veto items of business that displease him.
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