Against Violence, For Division

On Robert Fico

Yesterday, Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, was the subject of an assassination attempt. Greeting a crowd of supporters after a government meeting in the town of Handlová, Fico was shot five times, at point-blank range. The bullets pierced his abdomen and arm, and perhaps his leg.

The response of the Prime Minister’s security detail was haphazard. Video footage shows the guards reacting slowly, and failing to protect the Prime Minister after the shots threw him onto a nearby bench. Fico was immediately rushed to hospital and underwent five hours of surgery – he is currently in serious but stable condition.

The perpetrator of the shooting was apprehended at the scene and has been named by Slovak media as Juraj Cintula, a 71-year-old, poet, writer and former security guard from Levice.

The political response was swift. Slovakia’s outgoing President, the liberal Zuzana Čaputová wrote on X: ‘Utterly shocked by today's brutal attack on Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, which I condemn in strongest possible terms.’

European figures from Viktor Orbán to Ursula von der Leyen expressed their shock and condemnation of the attack. Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak also issued statements.

Volodymyr Zelensky, not someone who sees eye to eye with Robert Fico, stated on X that ‘We strongly condemn this act of violence against our neighboring partner state's head of government. Every effort should be made to ensure that violence does not become the norm in any country, form, or sphere.’  Putin said that ‘There can be no justification for this monstrous crime.’

Responses varied in detail but there were three common threads that could be identified across almost all of them.

The first was that violence is unjustifiable. Charles Michel, the President of the European Council wrote that, ‘Nothing can ever justify violence or such attacks.’ Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish Prime Minister said in a statement that ‘Nothing can ever justify violence.’ This is patently absurd.

Unless one is a pacificist (and most people are not) there are clearly many circumstances in which violence is justified. Self-defence is an obvious one. Certain utilitarian calculations can also make violence a moral necessity.

To be clear, in the case of this assassination attempt, violence was 100%, unambiguously not justified. A shock event, however, does not mean that politicians must suspend their critical faculties and tweet out untruths and banalities.

The second commonality in the responses to the assassination attempt was that it was an attack on democracy. In her speech, Čaputová, said that the shooting was ‘an attack on democracy’. The Guardian echoed this sentiment in their editorial.

It seems to me that the attack was an attack on Robert Fico rather than an attack on democracy. Democracy cannot be shot at point-blank range with a handgun in a provincial Slovakian town.

It is easy to see how the shooting could be seen as an assault on democracy. Robert Fico was the democratically elected Prime Minister. But if he was an appointed minister would this be less of an attack on democracy? If the British Prime Minister was attacked, would this be less of an attack on democracy since Britain’s unproportional electoral system is widely seen as ‘less democratic’? Is any attack on a politician an ‘attack on democracy’? How about an attack on a civil servant?

The perpetrator’s motives are unknown at this moment, but the attack has been described by the Interior Minister as ‘politically motivated’. Cintula’s politics are, from what we know, ambiguous, schizophrenic and confusing, but even if we are to grant that the attack was political, we cannot yet know that it was an ‘attack on democracy’. Perhaps, Mr Cintula had no quarrel with government ‘by the people, for the people and of the people’. He may have even seen Fico as a threat to democracy and believed that he was acting in democracy’s defence.

Intent matters. If the perpetrator says the attack wasn’t an attack on democracy; that attacking democracy wasn’t his intent, then we should take notice of that. It is possible that the attack still on balance hurt ‘democracy’ (however you even measure that), but what we can be sure of is that within minutes of a shock event it is impossible to definitively assess whether such an event was ‘an attack on democracy’ or not.

Again, I write not out of sympathy for the attack, or antipathy for democracy, but I write out of a desire for clarity and clear thinking. Cliché is the first response to tragedy but it shouldn’t be. All we know is that the attack was an attack on the Slovak Prime Minister.

The final sentiment in the responses to the attack was that it showed the dangers of political polarisation.

Incoming President and leader of Hlas party Peter Pellegrini said, ‘I am horrified by where the hatred towards another political opinion can lead.’ Quickly this narrative became the main take-away from the event, both for the governing forces, but for the media as well.

A senior member of Fico’s Smer party, L’uboš Blaha, attacked the opposition: ‘I want to express my deep disgust at what you have been doing here for the last few years. You, the liberal media, the political opposition, what kind of hatred did you spread towards Robert Fico? You built gallows for him.’

Věra Jourová, the deeply unimpressive European Commission vice-president and reliable provider of Eurocrat platitudes, told the Financial Times that, ‘All over Europe, we can see increased polarisation and hate… We have to understand that verbal violence can lead to physical violence.’

Both Blaha and Jourová have a strange understanding of causation. Whereas Jourová says that ‘verbal violence can lead to physical violence’ (anything can lead to anything else – that doesn’t mean it does), Blaha seems incredibly certain whom the blame, despite precious little evidence.

The political situation in Slovakia was described by many commentators as ‘on edge’ even before yesterday’s events. Fico’s reforms to the criminal justice system, as well as to the state media, mainly aimed at entrenching his own power, spawned waves of protest across the country.

It is clear that Slovak society is divided, even ‘polarised’ – recent electoral results bear this out. But what is the alternative?

Fico is undertaking big changes in policy compared to his predecessor. He is changing Slovak politics. His supporters support this and his opponents oppose this, therefore the country is ‘polarised’. Who should back down to stop this ‘polarisation’? Obviously neither side should, if they believe what they are doing is right.

Politics is conflict. It is not violence, but it is conflict. It is about friends and enemies. Democracy requires it; it requires two sides. Consensus is a slow-acting poison, rotting the body politic more than bouts of division and partisanship.

There is no alternative to what was happening in Slovakian politics before the attack. If people disagree with each other, then you cannot make them agree. Unity is fascist, not desired; division is democratic and healthy, not toxic.

I think when pushed, most people will come to agree with this. However, they will still call for the temperature in Slovak politics to be turned down. The reaction of Smer certainly hasn’t turned the temperature down as of yet, but it isn’t an ignoble goal. Slovak politics was always particularly rough but it has really seemed to descend into the gutter in recent years, with death threats, brawls and increasingly hysteric rhetoric the norm.

Despite this, linking the attack to political polarisation is a mistake. Again, we know very little, and shouldn’t rush to judgement, but in general, shock events are not indicative of anything. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be shock events.

One man, out of 5.4 million tells us nothing. Especially one man, who is clearly not representative of the population as a whole and seems to be, from what the people who knew him have said, an odd individual.

I would be more worried if the attacker was a young man, and the political instability was reaching Weimar levels of psychotic engagement, but a 71-year-old poet does not a revolution make.

It would be good if Slovak politics was more civil. If disagreement was still there, and was no less serious, but better expressed. However, it seems doubtful that a less raucous domestic political scene would have had any major impact of whether the shooting took place or not.

The political conclusions of the shooting of Fico seem to be near-unanimous and were reached without necessary thought: ‘polarisation, bad’. But such conclusions can be thoroughly misleading.

In the United Kingdom, following a Somali man stabbing Sir David Amess MP over twenty times in October 2021, politicians quickly reacted by blaming amorphous ‘online hate’ and ‘misogyny’, rather than examine the immigration system or the spread of Islamic extremism.

In Slovakia, the narrative is less fundamentally misleading, but is incorrect, nonetheless.

I can however, agree with a sentiment that has been voiced frequently over the last days: people should take a deep breath, and calm down, and think before they speak.

I only wish that politicians and commentators applied this to themselves before lecturing everyone else.