The Most Dangerous Enemies of European Democracy Don’t Carry Guns
21st May 2024
When the president of Slovakia called last week’s attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico “an attack on democracy,” every other EU leader nodded along. Yet behind the formal expressions of sympathy for Fico, the ambivalent reaction from Europe’s political and media elites to the attack on an elected national leader suggests that the EU establishment is not such a staunch defender of democracy after all.
Of course, nobody in high places expressed support for the would-be assassin or openly said that Slovakia’s populist PM deserved to get shot. But the implicit message was that such a ‘divisive’ and ‘polarising’ figure as Fico might have been asking for it. Summing up the mainstream news coverage, right-wing Italian media commentator Mario Giordano concluded that, “Basically, even if it isn’t specifically written in the newspapers, he was almost right to shoot him and he deserved it a little.”
For the Brussels oligarchy and their allies, Fico represents the ‘wrong’ sort of democracy. His Smer-Social Democracy party won last year’s elections on a platform which opposed mass migration, defended national sovereignty against centralised EU control, criticised NATO’s arming of Ukraine, and vowed to send “Not One Round” to Slovakia’s neighbour in its war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.