Whether Robert Fico survives and resumes office or not, Slovakia stands on the brink

A few years after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, known as the “velvet divorce”, the newly independent Slovakian state to the south was already a cause of concern. The US secretary of state at the time, Madeleine Albright, called it “the black hole” of Europe.

Eventually, in 2004 Slovakia joined the EU and Nato. The assumption then in the west was that the country, finally, had a settled identity and a settled set of alliances.

Then came Robert Fico, a prototype populist. He was an early embracer of identity politics: the good men and women of toil in the small towns and villages versus the metropolitan elite in Bratislava, the capital, with their imported ideas. As prime minister between 2006 and 2010 and then 2012 to 2018, he fulminated against the west for his domestic audience, exploiting the insecurities of many in central Europe after the financial crash.