A pro-Western protest movement in Slovakia that has been galvanized by the pro-Moscow trajectory of Prime Minister Robert Fico widened on Friday, with an estimated 110,000 people attending evening demonstrations in 41 towns in the country and another 13 cities across Europe.
Crowds were estimated at 42,000-45,000 in the capital of Bratislava, and at more than 20,000 in the eastern Slovak city of Košice, according to SafetyCrew, an event safety consultancy.
Unlike previous demonstrations, this week’s unrest also rocked smaller rural towns that until now have been bastions of support for the ruling leftist-populist Smer party.
Milo Janáč, 49, told POLITICO that he had been returning to his home town of Gelnica (pop. 6,202) by train two weeks ago from a protest in Bratislava when a newspaper interview caught his eye. In it, teacher Eva Wolfová explained that “it’s no big thing to have 50,000 people demonstrating in Bratislava and 15,000 in Košice. But the moment they get 300 people protesting in Gelnica, it’s all over [for the Fico government].”
Gelnica, an impoverished mining town settled in the 13th century by ethnic Germans from Bavaria, lies in the Slovak Ore Mountains in the east of the country. The average gross monthly wage there in August 2024 was €1,241, the third-lowest among Slovakia’s 79 districts. Fico’s Smer won in Gelnica with 30 percent of the vote in the most recent parliamentary elections.
“I took it as a challenge, and even on the train I started messaging people to ask if they could help,” said Janáč, who in addition to writing and bartending also serves as the spokesperson for the Gelnica mayor’s office.
“Robert Fico has a lot of voter support where I live. I know he’s not going to resign, no matter how many people turn out in Gelnica, but if these protests start spreading further among these smaller towns, we’ll be in a new reality,” Janáč said.
Fico, who before 1989 belonged to the Communist Party of then-Czechoslovakia, returned to power in October 2023 for his fourth term as prime minister. Along with Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, he has formed a pro-Russian salient within the European Union, and before Christmas last year paid court to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, spurning an unofficial EU ban on meeting with top Russian officials.
‘Losing our future’
More recently Fico has claimed, without providing evidence, that legionnaires from Georgia along with Ukrainian military counterintelligence were fomenting the protests in Slovakia to overthrow his government.
Janáč said the protests were indeed aimed at preventing Fico from “pulling us back to the past into the embrace of the Kremlin,” but he said they had other goals as well.
“Under Fico’s governments, we went from being the economic tiger of Europe to one of the poorest countries in the EU,” Janáč said. “Our school system is a disaster, and our health care is so bad that 10,000 people die here needlessly every year. Our young people see no prospects here and have left the country. We are losing our future,” he said.
On Friday, Janáč did get his crowd, with some 400 people showing up to protest in Gelnica. Actor Milan Kňažko, one of the central figures in the 1989 Velvet Revolution that ended Communism in the former Czechoslovakia, urged the protesters “not to let men from the past steal our futures and those of our children.”
Lucia Štasselová from the Bratislava-based NGO Mier Ukrajine (Peace to Ukraine), which has been organizing the protests, on Friday accused Fico of being “the main protagonist of Russia’s hybrid war in Slovakia.”
In a social media post, however, the Slovak leader on Friday cited a statement from the office of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that the EU executive “sees no indications that Slovakia is considering leaving the European Union” and that “cooperation between the Commission and the Slovak government is constructive and productive.”
“I ask myself, really, why people are going to protest today,” Fico wrote.
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