The National Uprising Square in the Slovak capital Bratislava it’s a riotous place these days. Thousands of people have demonstrated here several times since the beginning of the week and more rallies are to follow. The protesters thus continue the resistance of civil society, which had already started in Slovakia after the parliamentary elections in autumn 2023 – against the new left-wing populist-right-wing nationalist government, for which liberalism is apparently a bad word. At the time, the focus was on the weakening of the judiciary’s fight against corruption, Russia-friendly foreign policy and political interference in media freedom.

This time the measures of the Ministry of Culture were the final straw. There are, therefore, resounding reactions to the choices of the authoritarian Minister of Culture Martina Zimkomitsova and other government politicians. Zimkomicova fired the director general of the National Theatre, Matej Drlitska, and the head of the National Gallery, Aleksandra Kuza, last week. He had previously dismissed other important directors of cultural institutions. At the beginning of the summer, on the initiative of her ministry, the public television and radio station RTVS (Radio and Television of Slovakia) was dissolved and transferred to a renamed institution, called STVR (Slovak Television and Radio), in which the government can now exert much more direct political pressure than before.

Restructuring of the state

The measures are part of a rapid and massive restructuring of the state under Prime Minister Robert Fitzgerald. The nominally social democratic, but in fact largely right-wing nationalist party of Smer-SD (Toward Social Democracy) has been in power since October 2023, in a coalition with the social democratic party Hlas-SD and the right-wing nationalist Slovak National Party ( SNS). Fitso himself is prime minister for the fourth time. In 2018, he had to resign after the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kuznirova, because he himself was accused of corruption and involvement in organized crime. Now it appears that Fico is trying to secure power along the lines of his counterpart Viktor Orban in neighboring Hungary. Ficho and Orban are close friends.

The Mahala “view”.

In the field of culture and media, the work is carried out by the coalition partner SNS. One of the pioneers is the Secretary General of the Ministry of Culture, Lucas Mahala. He justified the restructuring of public broadcasting, among other things, by saying that people for whom the world is not a sphere, but a disc, should have their say. The far-right politician espouses anti-Semitism and other conspiracy theories and sees Russian President Vladimir Putin as the savior of Christian Europe. Meanwhile, the public broadcaster in the neighboring country of the Czech Republic has officially severed its previous close partnership with its hitherto partner Bratislava station due to journalistic concerns.

Mahala’s political boss, Culture Minister Zimkomitsova, also made similar comments. In an interview with the portal topky.sk, she said about the alleged “LGBT ideology”: “Europe is dying. No new children are being born because there is too much LGBTI pressure here, strangely enough among the white race itself.”

“State Security Methods”

Slovak writer Michal Hvoretsky summed up the situation speaking to the private TV station TA3 as follows: “The ministry is systematically removing our best cultural directors from senior positions and replacing them with staff who have friendly ties to the minister and people in her party, with people who share the same right-wing ideology.” After the dismissal in March of the elected head of the International House of Art for Children (Bibiana), Zuzana Liptakova, and the director of the National Library of Slovakia, Katarina Kristofova, and despite the protests of the workers, the Minister of Culture took the ax in the middle of the summer rush to bring the emblematic institutions of Slovak culture to bear.

Censorship trends

In a recent statement, the ruling parties Smer-SD, Hlas-SD and SNS described the protests as “the failure of the liberal media, political NGOs and the opposition to accept the results of the parliamentary elections” and threatened consequences if there was a further attack to representatives of the government coalition. An elegantly veiled reference to the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Fitzo in May.

The assassination attempt, which Fitzo barely survived, was carried out by a 71-year-old lone assailant with extremely confused political views, as is now known. But the act is being used politically to discredit the democratic protest: Fico himself said a few weeks after the attack that the attacker was motivated by the “desperate” opposition and “anti-government media” in Slovakia. He claimed that foreign forces, such as US stock market billionaire George Soros, were behind them. Fitzo copied this theory from his friend Viktor Orban. Hungary’s prime minister has often thickly characterized Soros, of Hungarian-Jewish descent, as the head of an alleged “global behind-the-scenes force” that has set as its goal the “extinction of the Hungarian nation.”

Edited by: Kostas Argyros