Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived multiple gunshot wounds on May 15, has issued his first public address since the assassination attempt. In a 14-minute video posted on Wednesday, just before a moratorium on electioneering ahead of the European elections, the populist leader said he felt “no hatred towards the stranger who shot me,” saying he was “only a messenger of evil and political hatred, which the politically unsuccessful and frustrated opposition developed in Slovakia to unmanageable proportions.”
Fico, an ally of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, is opposed to mass migration and the Western proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. He accused globalist opposition politicians, “foreign-funded political non-governmental organizations,” and corporate media outlets “co-owned by the financial structure of George Soros” of encouraging his attempted assassination by fomenting a poisonous political atmosphere.
“I fundamentally disagree with the single-correct-opinion policy that some major Western democracies are aggressively promoting today,” Fico said. He argued the EU and NATO have “literally sanctified the concept of the single correct opinion” on Ukraine, “namely that the war in Ukraine must continue at any cost in order to weaken the Russian Federation.”
Anyone who disagrees, he complained, is “immediately labeled as a Russian agent.”
Fico recalled charting an independent path for Slovakia during previous terms in office, for example, by refusing to assist the Bill Clinton-led NATO bombing of Serbia and withdrawing Slovak soldiers from Iraq. Now, he argued, “the right to a different opinion has ceased to exist in the EU.”
Michal Šimečka, chairman of the Progressive Slovakia opposition party, has already complained about Fico’s speech, saying he should have promoted social reconciliation. Another opposition leader said Fico, by calling out the globalists who facilitated his shooting, is the one promoting political division.
