The love affair between Slovakia’s prime minister and president is over.
And for their critics, it’s another sign the country is on the decline.
Robert Fico, the country’s increasingly illiberal prime minister, who was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in May, no longer has the support of his one-time loyal servant, President Peter Pellegrini.
Pellegrini, who was endorsed by Fico when he stood for the presidency, has in recent weeks hurled a string of criticisms the prime minister’s way ― from how he’s shifted the country toward authoritarianism to his failure to organize celebrations this year to commemorate the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and his backing for a prominent anti-vaxxer.
While the presidential pushback signals that just a year after returning to power for a fourth time, Fico is weaker than he once was and Pellegrini is making hay while the sun shines, many observers say that situation is only temporary.
“When he gets stronger, Pellegrini will stop with any kind of criticism,” said Michal Vašečka, a political scientist at the Bratislava Policy Institute. “Pellegrini will always play the pro-democratic, pro-European Slovakia card when he can afford to … it can continue, but only until Fico gets stronger again.”
Love and hate
When Fico endorsed Pellegrini in his bid to become president earlier this year, it was considered a forced marriage. Thanks to his backing, Pellegrini in April defeated pro-West diplomat Ivan Korčok — in the process becoming indebted to Fico.
But Fico and Pellegrini didn’t join forces because they liked each other — quite the opposite, in fact. Even in public, evidence suggests a mutual dislike — ranging from insults traded between the pair, to Pellegrini’s leaving Fico’s party and starting his own.
“Slovakia is falling apart,” Vašečka said. “It’s getting worse every month — and with a new tax package to come, in a country that is already the most expensive in Central Europe, people will be very dissatisfied, including Fico’s voters.”
The Slovak constitution gives the president limited powers that include appointing ambassadors, returning legislation to parliament and issuing amnesties. But a president hostile to the government can delay the process of passing laws.Pellegrini’s victory in the presidential election was seen as giving Fico’s ruling coalition total control over the executive and legislative branches in Bratislava.
But the strained relationship is bad news for Fico.Without Pellegrini’s tacit approval of government policies as president, the prime minister’s controversial reforms of the media, judiciary and police, which critics claim are anti-democratic, could take longer to implement.In the past, Pellegrini’s loyalty to Fico had earned him the derogatory nickname podržtaška — lit. one who holds bags, a term for a minion or a flunky — with thousands of Slovaks calling him that in protests ahead of the election.
“The president will now have the opportunity to show the nature of his mandate,” Korčok, the former presidential candidate and foreign minister who recently joined the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, told POLITICO. “He is a president who emerged from a government coalition, but the head of state is supposed to be nonpartisan, distant from politics.”
The coalition rift is obvious, he said, and is making the country unstable.
How it started
The history between the pair goes back to 2002, when Pellegrini entered politics as an assistant to an MP with Fico’s leftist-populist Smer (Direction) party, which Fico had founded three years earlier.
Pellegrini proceeded to climb the career ladder and has since held many positions, from minister to prime minister and now president.
According to Vašečka, he owes his success to Fico. In turn, Fico expects Pellegrini to be loyal.
Fico is “an authoritarian person who values nothing more than loyalty,” Vašečka said. “At one point, Pellegrini was not loyal. And Fico never forgave him. Their relationship has never been good, and from 2020 it’s been outright bad.”Fico himself once said that he “created” Pellegrini.When Fico was forced to step down in 2018 after mass protests following the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, Pellegrini replaced him as prime minister. His ambitions grew, and in June 2020 he announced he would split from Smer and create his own carbon-copy party, Hlas (Voice).
Since the October 2023 parliamentary election, which Fico won, Hlas has been a member of the Smer-led ruling coalition along with the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS), and has supported of all Smer’s decisions.
Government in crisis
Pellegrini’s rebellion against Fico is therefore a sign that the governing coalition is undergoing more serious turmoil.
Fico’s government currently has only a razor-thin majority of 76 out of 150 MPs in the parliament after three SNS MPs quit their caucus in October due to internal disputes. The trio threaten to withhold support for the coalition until it meets their demands.In another rift, Hlas and the SNS have squabbled over the post of speaker of parliament, which was previously held by Pellegrini before he won the presidency.To add to the coalition’s misery, a pro-European opposition liberal party, Progressive Slovakia, has been rising in the polls and in December had the support of 24.8 percent of eligible voters, with Smer trailing behind on 19.1 percent, a sign of the depth of voter discontent with government policies — notably the introduction of a large tax package. Fico hinted at a Smer party congress in November that he might call a snap election.
Fico’s office did not reply to a request to comment, nor did any of his MPs.
Pellegrini’s spokesperson denied there was any discord between Fico and Pellegrini, and told POLITICO that the president remained “a stabilizing and unifying element on the Slovak political scene.”“As the directly elected president, he has a mandate from the people to defend their interests,” the spokesperson said. “He is therefore ready to appreciate if the government fulfils these interests through its actions, and is equally ready to be critical if the government deviates from this task.”
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