<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/17/robert-fico-shooting-slovakia-political-war>
"Shortly after the shooting of Robert Fico, I received a phone call from my
sister. She was extremely upset – not just about the shocking attack, but also
about an incident on the bus on the way home from work in the moments after the
news had broken. Two elderly fellow passengers reacted to the attempted
assassination by blaming liberals and progressives in general, and in
particular Michal Šimečka, an opposition politician and former vice-president
of the European parliament. One passenger called for the death penalty to be
reinstated and order to be restored.
At that point, the circumstances of the shooting were entirely unclear,
information was partial, and it was too early to condemn or point the finger at
anyone. My sister, who considers herself a liberal, spoke up to argue against
the other passengers.
But when she phoned me to say she was worried about what would come next, I
could feel her trembling.
Slovakia has long experience with “restoring order”. When the liberal part of
the population hears these words, we think not only of the threat of Viktor
Orbán-type autocracy, but of our 40 years of communist dictatorship or the
wartime fascist Slovak state. But an increasingly big part of the Slovak
population, fuelled by nostalgia and low expectations, is ready to embrace what
such regimes promise – and in a way, I can understand why.
In the past five years, Slovakia has experienced a churn of collapsed or
disgraced governments, unsolved murders, mass protests, a disastrously handled
Covid pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the ensuing war next
door, an influx of refugees from across the border and record inflation.
With each such event, the various tribes of opinion in our deeply divided
society drift apart like broken ice floes on opposing currents. As in Poland or
Hungary, there are fairly clear dividing lines: between conservative voters and
liberals, between younger and older people, between those who feel part of the
west as embodied by the European Union and those who look eastward, towards
Russia. Some call for freedom, individual responsibility and equality; others
for the strong hand of the state, the security, safety and order of an
autocratic system. On one side are opposition supporters, and their leader, the
young Šimečka; and on the other side is the governing coalition, with Fico at
its head."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
