ROB CAMERON

“Populism is not the only way to resolve frustrations,” said Zuzana Caputova. Rays of spring sunshine poured through the windows of a Bratislava café for her first TV interview with the international media since she was elected Slovakia’s first female president. She’s a liberal, pro-EU figure using words like “truth”, “tolerance” and “compassion” – a rarity these days in Central Europe.

A brown bear that injured five people during a rampage in a Slovak town has been shot dead, Environment Minister Tomas Taraba says. However, opposition politicians believe hunters may have shot a different bear, and are calling for answers. Controlling Slovakia’s bear population has become a highly politicised issue under the new populist-nationalist government.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is defying EU officials in the migrant crisis – and may win re-election on Saturday. Slovak voters will decide whether to give his Smer party another four years in office. Fico told a crowd of supporters in a packed sports hall in Bratislava he would not “bring one single Muslim to Slovakia’ as part of an EU quota system.

The murder of reporter Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová convulsed Slovak society. The wave of public anger and disgust led to the fall of Prime Minister Robert Fico and ultimately the election of liberal Zuzana Čaputová as president. There was also hope (short-lived) that Slovakia could untie the Gordian knot between high-level politics and endemic corruption.

Thousands have attended protest rallies across Slovakia in memory of murdered journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, shot in a targeted killing a year ago. Kuciak had been investigating alleged corruption linked to Italian organised crime – a story which would, after his death, bring down the government. It remains unclear who ordered the killings.

Slovakia votes on Saturday in its first general election since an investigative journalist and his fiancée were murdered in 2018. The shooting of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová shocked the nation and toppled PM Robert Fico, but his Smer-SD party remains in office. Polls are tight, and support has swelled for an ultra-nationalist party.

Slovaks are voting in early elections following the collapse of the former centre-right government. Leading most polls is the populist SMER party of Robert Fico, who has pledged an immediate end to Slovak military support for Ukraine. But Fico’s former party colleague turned rival, Peter Pellegrini, is also likely to play a decisive role in forming the new government.

Peter Pellegrini has been elected president of Slovakia. A former prime minister, Mr Pellegrini is an ally of Prime Minister Robert Fico, and shares the PM’s opposition to arming Ukraine. Mr Pellegrini’s campaign echoed some of Fico’s Moscow-friendly rhetoric, vowing after his victory “to ensure that Slovakia remains on the side of peace and not on the side of war”.

Robert Fico might have promised to send “not one more round of ammunition” to Ukraine, but he wasn’t speaking for all Slovaks. When the government cut off state-supplied military aid, citizens banded together, raising €1m for artillery shells within 48 hours. They included Otto Simko, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor and veteran of the Slovak National Uprising.

Slovakia’s populist government has caused alarm with plans to abolish the country’s public broadcaster, prompting renewed fears for the independence of the Slovak media. The move is being spearheaded by Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová, who previously co-hosted an online TV channel promoting pro-Russian narratives and disinformation about Covid.

Robert Fico describes himself as a leftist and a social democrat. But his Smer party is in government with the far-right, and his language is increasingly vitriolic and nationalist. He’s blamed the assassination attempt of May 2024 on the liberal opposition as well as his pro-peace stance, and says Vladimir Putin has been ‘wrongly demonised’ by the west.

Slovakia’s populist prime minister, Robert Fico, has claimed the opposition is planning a “Maidan”-style coup, referring to the popular uprising that toppled Ukraine‘s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Fico, who survived an assassination attempt last May, quoted from what he said was a classified report ahead of a motion of no-confidence.

The Slovak government has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest. A total of 350 out of an estimated 1,300 animals will be culled under the plan. “We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods,” Prime Minister Robert Fico told reporters after a cabinet meeting.