THE fallout from the murder on February 25th of an investigative journalist, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée this week brought down Robert Fico, who served as Slovakia’s prime minister for ten of the past 12 years. Mr Fico had put up a fight. Drawing on Viktor Orban’s playbook from neighbouring Hungary, he had hoped to defuse the crisis by blaming a conspiracy of foreigners including George Soros, a billionaire financier, for the political upheaval. But after 50,000 demonstrators (one in nine residents) took to the streets in Bratislava calling for his resignation on March 9th, it was clear that he had failed.
Slovaks have mobilised in numbers unseen since the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and on March 9th there were parallel protests in more than 30 other towns and cities, many considered the heartland of Mr Fico’s nationalist Smer party. In the eastern city of Presov, Zlatica Kusnirova, mother of Martina Kusnirova, who was shot alongside Mr Kuciak, addressed a crowd of 7,000. “Nobody is...Continue reading
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