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Political violence is on the rise again, at home and abroad
In a small town out in coal country, a lone assassin shoots a controversial populous leader. The leader miraculously survives, and his supporters blame the press and his political opponents for fomenting violence. Does that sound familiar? Months before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania in the first assassination attempt of its kind in America in 40 years, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico took a bullet to the stomach during a visit to Central Slovakia. But Fico is just one of many leaders or high-level candidates who have been attacked in democracies around the world in recent years.
Across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles. Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016. And as we head into the most contentious and high-stakes election in America's modern history, people are bracing for more. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump's life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely. Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence? Is it our leaders, our media outlets, or our social media platforms? Is it ourselves? Unless things change, we will be lucky if it's another 40 years before this happens again in the US.
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Why was Slovakia's Prime Minister attacked?
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Tallinn, Estonia.
What was the background to the attempted assassination of the Prime Minister of Slovakia?
Well, we don't know everything. A person, 71-year-old man has been apprehended. But the background seems to be that the attempt was triggered by the climate of polarization that has been there in Slovak policies for quite some time, notably this year with elections, presidential one, last year with parliamentary elections, but even before that. So the lesson of this horrible act is that we have to be careful with the political culture and the political climate in our democracies. Otherwise, there's a risk-averse, triggering actions by individuals of this sort.
Are there really risks of a new wave of Russian attempts to destabilize Europe?
Well, what's been happening in the last few weeks is that it's been put out warnings by NATO itself, as a matter of fact, by individual countries in NATO that they have seen indications that Russia has started to encourage recent acts of sabotage, of violence, of different sorts of disturbing and destabilizing activities throughout Europe in a way that we haven't seen to the same extent before. It is, of course, if that is the case, and this seems to be the case, a sign of the desperation of the regime in Moscow, and how it’s trying to, in different ways, escalate their confrontation with the countries of Europe. We'll see how much this will have an effect, and we'll see how much the countermeasures that will be taken will also have an effect.
Slovakian President-elect Peter Pellegrini gestures, at F.D. Roosevelt University Hospital where Prime Minister Robert Fico was taken after a shooting incident in Handlova, in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia, May 16, 2024.
Fico survived, but concerns about violence persist ahead of Euro elections
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico survived Wednesday’s assassination attempt “by a hair,” said President-elect Peter Pellegrini on Thursday, as authorities reported that the shooter was a “lone wolf” without providing further details.
Meanwhile, although the government chose not to impose a state of emergency, police have boosted security for other politicians, schools, and media outlets amid concerns the shooting could provoke more violence in a country bitterly polarized between conservative nationalist and progressive forces.
Outgoing President Zuzana Čaputová, a rival of Fico’s, said the shooting was an attack on democracy itself and lamented the “hateful rhetoric” that pervades Slovak political discourse.
Interior Minister Matuš Sutaj Estok’sinitial suggestion that the country was on the “edge of civil war” was almost certainly an overstatement, but he also said journalists specifically should “reflect” on their role in creating conditions for the attack, while members of Fico’s party openly blamed the opposition.
The wider view: Attacks on politicians are becoming more common elsewhere in the EU, as polarizing rhetoric increasingly sets the context for physical attacks. With just three weeks until the European Parliament elections, we’re watching to see if the attempt on Fico’s life scares people straight or opens the way to more violence.
Slovkia's Prime Minister Robert Fico is in serious condition after being severely wounded in an assassination attempt.
Slovakia "on the brink" after PM shot
Robert Fico, the outspoken, nationalistic prime minister of Slovakia, was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on Wednesday.
Fico was shot while greeting a crowd in a small town in central Slovakia. Police arrested the shooter, whom local media have identified as a 71-year-old disaffected writer and security guard. Slovakia’s interior minister said the shooting was “clearly” politically motivated but would not release info on the suspect.
As of this writing, Fico was in stable but serious condition after undergoing a lengthy surgery.
Slovakia is extremely polarized. Last fall, Fico won a bitterly contested election against the Progressive Slovakia party, running on a platform of halting military aid to Ukraine, rejecting refugees, and defending traditional values.
He’s long been a controversial figure — he last served as PM between 2013 and 2018, when he was ousted amid mass protests over his government’s alleged involvement in the murder of two investigative journalists.
Slovakia is now bracing for more conflict. The interior minister has warned that with tensions high, the country stands on the brink of “civil war.” Members of Fico’s party angrily blamed “progressive media” and the opposition, raising the prospect of violent street-level reprisals. Any moves by the government to exert pressure on the media could quickly stoke tensions with Brussels over EU rules.
More: How and why did Czechoslovakia manage to split up peacefully in 1993? Read our explainerhere.Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico gestures as he attends a joint news conference with the French President at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, June 22, 2016.
After pivotal election, Slovakia forms new government
Two weeks after winning Slovakia’s elections, former PM Robert Fico, a left-wing populist who campaigned on limiting illegal migration and curtailing military support for Ukraine, has struck a deal to form a new government.
Fico’s social democratic SMER-SSD will form a coalition with the moderate center-left HLAS (Voice) party and the nationalist SNS party.
The former PM’s criticisms of EU sanctions on Russia and his calls for Kyiv to negotiate with Moscow had raised fears that Slovakia, under his leadership, might break ranks with its fellow NATO and EU members on some aspects of Ukraine policy. Fico has said that he supports reconstruction and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, but he doesn’t want to send more Slovak weapons.
The coalition memorandum explicitly reaffirms Slovakia’s commitment to a foreign policy shaped by its membership in NATO and the EU, while also respecting “sovereignty.”
HLAS’ moderating influence, as well as Fico’s track record of governing more pragmatically than he campaigns, likely played a role in the decision to directly address the NATO and EU issue early on. But we’ll see Fico’s stripes more clearly soon enough: He is likely to be confirmed as PM ahead of an EU summit later this month that will focus largely on Ukraine.
For a deeper explainer of who Fico is, what a journalist’s murder has to do with him, and how Ukraine played into the election, see here.
Ukraine's aid struggles will worsen if McCarthy is ousted
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week and a challenging week indeed for President Zelensky as we start to see more pushback on the ability to continue to support the Ukrainians in defending themselves against the ongoing Russian invasion.
A few different stories here. The most meaningful one being the push against Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, particularly around support for Ukraine aid. And if McCarthy goes down, that is a big hit to the ability to get additional Ukrainian aid approved over the coming months. Any future speaker that sees that the conservatives of the GOP were prepared to take out Kevin McCarthy for willingness to work with the Democrats and get Ukrainian funding done separately would certainly mean that his replacement is going to be very hard pressed to put forward legislation that would continue to fund them. So this has become a big political football in the United States. Republicans, now identified Republicans, a majority say that too much aid is going from the United States. Ukraine should be significantly reduced, if not cut off entirely. Democrats, those numbers are also going up, but they're still in the minority, about 30% and independents more like 40 to 50.
But that's very, very different from where aid to Ukraine was three months ago, six months ago, twelve months ago, not aligned with President Biden, not aligned with what had been a bipartisan consensus. And while there's a lot of economic aid that goes from Ukraine, from Europe to Ukraine, the military support comes overwhelmingly from the United States. So this is a very serious problem, makes it very hard to imagine that Ukraine would be able to engage in a second offensive next year. And, of course, that means that the land that they presently occupy is the land that they look to be occupying for at least the near term, foreseeable future. That's one point.
Secondly, Canada, which has been one of the strongest supporters of Ukraine with a large Ukrainian population, ethnic Ukrainian population, that's politically very salient in Canada. They had their speaker of the Canadian parliament forced to resign after introducing and celebrating a man as a war hero that had fought with a Nazi unit in World War II. It is very clear that the speaker had no idea that that was his background. And he comes from northern Ontario. He knows nothing about foreign policy. But hugely embarrassing for the Trudeau government and for a government that has been, again, very, very outspoken in what they're willing to provide for the Ukrainians. And if you oppose that, you now have a lot of grist for your mill.
And then finally, Robert Fico, the former PM of Slovakia had been forced out for corruption, just had an election. Parliamentary election. His party came in front. They will form a coalition in the coming weeks and he ran on a left wing Slovak populist platform, but also on a strongly pro-Russian platform and has said that there will be no more military aid coming from Slovakia to Ukraine. That doesn't actually matter. They don't provide very much that they did. That matter was just at the beginning. And also, it's not going to prevent the EU from ongoing economic support. The Slovaks will be bought off, especially in coalition. But these are significant pieces in showing a level of fatigue for supporting the ongoing Ukraine war. It is a meaningful effort. It is tens and tens of billions of dollars in euros and no end to the war in sight. So increasingly you're seeing voices saying, well, how might one go about negotiation?
And of course, most publicly, the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, who just over the last couple of days was posting pro-Kremlin propaganda, going after Zelensky. An enormous turnaround for a man who had done among the most of anyone to support the Ukrainians in providing his own Starlink system, ostensibly just for humanitarian purposes. But he knew very well it was being used and supported it being used to help defend the Ukrainians from invasion made a big difference. He's not there now. Now he's saying this war needs to end, the aid needs to end and has been supporting and promoting a lot of pro-Russian and anti Ukrainian accounts.
So you put all of that together.I do think that this is a much more challenging set of headwinds for Zelensky and for the Ukrainian people trying to defend themselves. Now, what does that all mean? Well, it's not going to affect the EU accession process, which continues to move and will provide a lot of economic support and promote a lot of economic reform in Ukraine, which is necessary. And the Russians are not going to be able to suddenly turn on their own offensive because they don't have the troops available. They haven't yet put forward a new mobilization and Putin is unlikely to do that until after his own internal parliamentary elections in the coming year. And once you do that, you still need to train them.
So I would say we're probably a minimum of a year before the Russians would be able to make significant additional gains against Ukraine in the worst case scenario for the Ukrainians. Also, the Ukrainians have had some successes, not in terms of taking territory, but in their ability to target the Black Sea fleet and their ability to engage in successful drone strikes against Crimea occupied by Russia as well as against Russian territory, the Russian homeland itself. They've also been able to get their own ships out into the Black Sea, which means more food and fertilizer coming from Ukraine, even though that deal that had been brokered by the UN and Turkey has fallen apart. So, I mean, these are not end times for the Ukrainians by any means, but it is very hard to see anything that looks like what the Ukrainians would describe as a victory, meaning at the minimum, pushing the Russians out of all the territory that they have taken of Ukraine since February 24th. And I'm not even thinking about things like war reparations and the rest.
And in that regard, you know, the need for the Americans and NATO to sit down with the Ukrainian government and try to figure out how one might, over time get to a cease fire, what can be provided to the Ukrainians that would allow them to and accept a reality where all of their land is not coming back to them? Politically, that's almost inconceivable right now. I can't see any Ukrainian leader that would be able to sell that to his own population. Maybe the exception is if there was full NATO accession as a member that ensured that the West would actually defend non-occupied Ukraine from further assault. But the Americans are not there right now and that gets harder to promote the closer we get to the upcoming elections. There's also risks and that of course, because it means yes, indeed, the West would actually be defending Ukraine from further Russian strikes. So this is looking increasingly difficult in terms of endgame and more problematic for the Biden administration and the coherence of NATO.
That is the analysis as I see it. And we'll keep following this very closely of course. I hope everyone’s doing well, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
The president-elect of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu, left, and SMER-SSD party leader Robert Fico, right.
Election update: China champion takes Maldives, Russia scores in Slovakia
Indeed, Muizzu, mayor of the capital city of Male, campaigned on the slogan “India out.” He previously served as the construction minister in the pro-China government of Abdulla Yameen, who is now jailed on corruption charges. Under Yameen, the Maldives secured several Chinese-funded infrastructure projects, including a $200 million bridge connecting Male to the airport, and joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In an online meeting with Chinese Communist Party officials last year, Muizzu pledged that his party’s return to power would grow the “strong ties between our two countries.”
China wants to leverage the strategic location of the Maldives and safeguard the passage of its energy supplies through the area from the Gulf states. But India’s influence may not be that easy to uproot, and there are concerns that too close an alliance with China could tip the Maldives into the “Chinese debt trap,” a fate that has befallen other small nations.
Meanwhile, in Slovakia, the Kremlin-friendly SMER party, led by Robert Fico, performed better than expected, garnering 22.9% of the popular vote and topping the pro-Ukrainian Progressive Slovakia party’s 17.9%. Fico is a former two-term prime minister who was forced to resign in 2018 after the murder of a journalist who had been exposing corruption allegations against the government. Now, Fico is expected to assemble a coalition with the moderate-left Hlas party, an offshoot of SMER, and the nationalist, pro-Russian Slovak National Party.
SMER’s victory spells trouble for NATO: Fico promises to immediately cease providing military support to Ukraine and withdraw Slovakia’s previous support for Ukraine’s NATO membership. His win could also prove problematic for the EU as Fico is an ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, who gleefully posted on X, “Guess who’s back! Always good to work together with a patriot.” If Poland’s governing Law & Justice party wins a third term in the country’s Oct. 15 election, this trend of illiberal, Brussels skepticism will be further strengthened.Leaders of various political parties attend a televised debate ahead of Slovak early parliamentary election.
Will Slovakia elect a pro-Russian premier?
On Saturday, Slovaks hit the polls in an election that has Brussels and Washington on edge. The wily left-wing, populist former PM Robert Fico, who wants to end support for neighboring Ukraine and block the country’s accession to NATO and the EU, is running neck-and-neck with the liberal Progressive Slovakia party.
Fico (that’s “FEE-tso” if you want to say it like a Slovak) has served two prior stints as PM. He was ousted in 2018 amid allegations that his associates had murdered an investigative journalist for reporting on corruption. Since then, Slovaks have suffered a succession of weak and unstable caretaker governments.
Fico has surged in the polls in part by playing on Slovaks’ historic pan-Slavic affinity for Russia, which some say has been boosted by recent Russian influence campaigns. He has also pledged to crack down on migration.
Critics and supporters alike think Fico could try to become an “illiberal” European leader in the mold of Hungary’s PM Viktor Orbán. Given the EU’s unanimity requirements for major policy initiatives, a Fico-led government could complicate the union’s future EU expansion initiatives or sanctions against Russia – particularly in a partnership with Budapest.
That said, no matter who wins on Saturday, a fragmented vote means it will be hard to form an ideologically coherent government. That could limit any radical changes under Fico – but could also undermine a liberal government. Still, Fico’s strong showing is already a potential bellwether of cracks in the EU’s Ukraine policy, even among Kyiv’s closest European neighbors.
For more on this: How did Slovakia become an independent country without bloodshed? Read our look back at the unusual “Velvet Divorce” here.