The Beginning of the End for Robert Fico?
Slovakia’s prime minister is determined to pull the country towards autocracy—but the public may yet fight back.
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Having dominated his country’s public life for almost two decades, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, has undeniable political skills. But the more he ventures onto the international stage, the more erratic his instincts become—both substantively and as a matter of political strategy.
Long a nostalgist for the Soviet era, Fico seems eager to tread the path pioneered by Viktor Orbán eleven years ago in his famous speech on “illiberal democracy,” delivered in Romania’s spa town of Băile Tușnad. “Liberalism and the idea of liberal democracy have completely collapsed. It’s terribly ineffective,” Fico said after his trip to Moscow on May 9, where he held talks with the leader of Vietnam, among others.
Days before the NATO summit in The Hague, at which the Slovak government essentially acquiesced to the alliance’s new, more ambitious defense spending goals, Fico also floated the idea of Slovakia’s supposed “neutrality.” While both half-baked (who would provide a non-NATO Slovakia with any kind of security guarantees?) and highly disturbing to pro-Western voters, the idea also tapped into a long tradition in Slovak politics. Every generation has had leaders who argued that the country was too small and too insignificant to shape its own geopolitical environment. The best way to preserve the nation’s existence, this school of thought posits, is to keep its head down and avoid entanglements with the world’s big players—especially those to Slovakia’s west.
Earlier this year, Fico spoke at conservative CPAC conferences in Washington and Budapest, seeking to ingratiate himself with the budding MAGA international. He also visited Armenia and, more recently, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In Tashkent, he waxed poetic about the economic progress recorded since Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s arrival to power in 2016, following the death of Uzbekistan’s previous strongman of 25 years.
This is a country built on a strong, wise, and highly educated president. I keep talking about democratic and free parliamentary elections in Slovakia and about changing the system by reducing the number of political parties … When you have a hundred different political factions, you cannot compete [with countries such as Uzbekistan]. When you have a coalition cabinet with four political parties, you cannot compete.
Fico’s claims strain credulity—particularly against the background of his own dominance of Slovak politics. With the exception of Viktor Orbán, few figures in Eastern Europe have had the same staying power or degree of control over their respective countries. Fico is currently serving for the fourth time as prime minister. He’s led a single-party government, as well as governments featuring junior coalition partners.
Under his watch, the economic gap between the country and its neighbors has widened—in fact, Slovakia’s real per capita income now lags behind Romania’s. The budget deficit, meanwhile, is at 5 percent, setting the country’s public finances on an unsustainable trajectory, as the EU has noted. The extra government spending is not reflected in the quality of public services. Slovakia still lacks a highway connection between its two major cities. Its railway infrastructure seems to be crumbling away. The country’s PISA scores are in freefall and the country has one of the highest preventable and treatable mortality rates in the EU, to cite just a few of its many problems.
If too much political pluralism, division, and discontinuity between governments were the problem, the notoriously fragmented Czech political system—or the highly polarized one in Poland—would have been delivering worse outcomes than governments where power has been held by a single party, or close to it, such as Hungary and Slovakia. Yet on essentially any metric from economic performance through health to corruption, the opposite seems to be the case.
Of course, Fico is not making an academic argument about the merits of autocracy. Rather, he is convinced that his messaging is the best response to the gradual attrition of support for his party, resulting from voters’ fatigue, exhaustion from Fico, and an overwhelming sense of the country’s stagnation, if not absolute decline. The answer to his political problem is to try to suffocate his more radical competitors. On cultural and international issues, the once-pragmatic Fico is now eagerly competing for votes that would otherwise drift toward the extreme right, some of which carry heavy neo-Nazi baggage.
Following his return from the political wilderness in 2023, and an assassination attempt against him last year, Fico has started shedding his earlier inhibitions. In the past, he would grumble about sanctions on Russia or the diktat from Brussels, but he usually trod cautiously to avoid open confrontation with Europe’s bigger players. He is less careful now, as illustrated by his recent exchanges with Germany’s Friedrich Merz. And while Slovakia played ball at the NATO summit, it also decided to up the ante at June’s European Council, where Fico joined forces with Orbán to stop the EU’s 18th sanctions package against Russia.
Yet Fico’s use of Central Asian remnants of communist totalitarianism, and his Orbán cosplay, are far from a political slam dunk. Think what you will of Slovaks, few of them want their country to be the next Vietnam or Uzbekistan. For many, the reasons may have to do more with arrogant ethnocentrism than with deep insights into comparative politics, but even Fico’s voters tend to take Slovakia’s relative prosperity and security, and its place within the EU, as a given. The timing might also be inauspicious. Polling suggests that, just like Orbán (who appears headed for electoral defeat next year), Fico is on borrowed time.
His authoritarian musings must also be seen in the context of a spectacular system of kleptocracy and patronage that he has built in Slovakia. To highlight just one egregious case among many, Fico-connected business people, currently under investigation by members of the European Parliament, directed €60 million from the EU’s Agricultural Payment Agency into the construction of lavish private residences.
Needless to say, there was a commercial side to Fico’s trips to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, too, involving energy and defense companies with close connections to Fico’s government. In particular, Slovakia is keen to sell Slovak-made artillery pieces to Uzbekistan, despite its track record of circumventing Western sanctions against Russia. Just how much economic opportunity awaits Slovak companies is unclear—nor is it obvious how displays of friendship from Central Asian dictators will bolster Fico’s waning chances of staying in power following the next parliamentary election.
In early June, a viral video of Fico’s motorcade heading to the CPAC venue in Budapest showed the local police stopping an ambulance (which had its sirens on) to allow for unhampered passage of the Slovak VIP. Even in the best of times, it would have been a highly unflattering, disgraceful look for any European politician. For Fico—and for his Hungarian host and mentor—it may come to illustrate the beginning of their political end.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.
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One can only hope that it will be the end of Fico.