Some 100,000 demonstrators in cities across Slovakia on Friday demanded that their government stop flirting with Russia and respect the country’s obligations toward its Western partners in NATO and the European Union.
“We’re here to remind you, politely but clearly, that we already chose years ago where we want to belong,” said actor Tomáš Maštalír in front of 60,000 people in the capital Bratislava, in a reference to Slovakia’s membership in the EU and the North Atlantic defense alliance since 2004.
Maštalír mocked statements by Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who had warned ahead of the rallies that the country’s SIS secret service had found evidence of foreign-financed “structures” that were actively seeking to overthrow his government and to misuse the protests to create “conflicts with state security forces to further escalate tensions.”
“We understand that this country’s political leadership can’t imagine that anyone could act freely and independently without some kind of personal gain,” Maštalír said.
The protest rallies, which happened simultaneously in more than 30 Slovak towns, were organized by the “Slovakia is Europe” NGO in response to a sharp foreign policy turn toward Moscow by Fico’s government since it took office in October 2023. In addition to their demands for good governance and a more transparent foreign policy, the organizers called on Fico to resign.
Fico, who was a member of the Communist Party in the former Czechoslovakia and is serving his fourth term as Slovak leader, on Dec. 22 met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in a rare visit to the Russian capital by a European leader since the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. Fico has also ended Slovakia’s military support for Ukraine, and has campaigned against EU sanctions on Russia.
An MP from Fico’s Smer (Direction) party, Tibor Gašpár, told the STVR public broadcaster on Jan. 17 that “the door must remain open to a situation when we might eventually consider such a drastic solution as leaving the EU.”
Such sentiments, until recently unthinkable from mainstream politicians in the country, have galvanized liberal and Westward-leaning Slovaks.
In Prešov in eastern Slovakia, some 100 kilometers from the Ukraine border, Eva Kulová, 84, told a crowd of 7,000 that “the specter of a coup haunts them [the Fico government] day and night.”
Kulová was among the founders of the Verejnosť proti nasiliu (Public Against Violence) NGO, which in 1989 helped topple Communism in then-Czechoslovakia, ending 40 years of oppression by the Soviet Union.
“Those debts [from Communism] will continue to be paid by generations of our descendants,” she said. “But we are here because of a different deficit. A moral deficit. That’s what brought us out to these city squares. And there will be more and more of us. Those who want to live in our little Slovakia, but in a civilized Europe.”
On hand to support the protesters was Czech comic actor Bolek Polívka, 75, whose films are still shown on Slovak television. “Your prime minister’s claims of a foreign-organized coup are a cry of despair,” he told the Bratislava crowd. “The most important thing is that Slovakia remain free,” he said.
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