Fico shooting not only exposes poisonous politics but Slovakia’s fractured zeitgeist

The assassination attempt on Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, is unprecedented in the country’s history. 

But the attack, which the premier is likely to survive, speaks to an increasingly poisonous atmosphere in the central European nation of 5.5 million people.

In response to the attack, Zuzana Caputova, the country’s liberal outgoing president, and her successor Peter Pellegrini, an ally of the prime minister, have jointly called for calm. 

But some sense of the tensions they are trying to manage could be gleaned from the reaction of Tomas Taraba, the deputy premier from the ultranationalist Slovak National Party, who said that “the entire opposition” had “blood on their hands”, or from the finance minister from the ruling Smer party who blamed the media for “the hunt that [they] set off [on the premier]”.