After the assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, which landed the politician in the hospital with serious gunshot wounds, the propaganda inherent in such cases was launched basically immediately. To choose from: political in Slovakia itself, international, Russian, left-wing, right-wing, or hooked on the personal lives of assassin Juraj Cintula and his wife. According to different versions of propaganda, the coup is blamed on everyone in turn, depending on who is talking about it: Fico himself, the Russians, Americans, Slovaks, leftists, nationalists….
- It’s already certain that the Slovak parliament will vote on the media law in June, as SMER and its coalition partners have the required majority there. Thus, they will subordinate the public media to the government. And the president – Peter Pellegrini, working with Robert Fico – is likely to sign the bill, especially after what happened.
- On the surface at least, Fico is a pro-Russian politician. From his rhetoric it seems that “Ukrainian nationalists” are to blame for the war in Ukraine, he proclaims that he is “for peace,” but by this “peace” he means the de facto subjugation of Ukraine to Russia.
- Russian propaganda: Simonian believes that the theory that the assassin Juraj Cintula acted alone is false, and compared the case of the assassination of Robert Fico with the assassination of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
- Also: The wife of the bomber, Juraj Cintula, is not a Ukrainian activist. This is fake news. And there are indeed many more.
Politics vs. truth
Politicians of SMER, the populist leftist-nationalist party that leads the ruling coalition, began accusing the progressive and pro-European opposition of the assassination in the early hours, claiming that its “hate campaigns” provoked the assassin, Slovak writer, poet and occasional activist Juraj Cintula, 71, to attempt the murder. This is all the more so because, although Cintula has in the past been a sympathizer of the pro-Russian paramilitary organization Slovensci Branci, and although racist content could be found in one of his books on the Roma, he has for some time shifted to decidedly pro-European and anti-Fitist positions, which he shares with the democratic and progressive Slovak opposition.
And this one, it is true, Robert Fico criticized, and sometimes harshly. There was also something to be thankful for: his party’s previous terms in power – SMER – were riddled with corruption scandals, and such that, among other things, he was not only a member of the SMER, but also a member of the SMER. Fico himself – specially appointed to investigate corruption at the peaks of power – was charged by the prosecutor’s office with founding an organized crime group. But before that happened, the investigative journalist investigating the scandals, Jan Kuciak, was killed (and, shot dead along with his partner in their own bed, his fiancée, Martina Kušnírova). The murder sparked public protests, Robert Fico’s government resigned, and the next team set up the aforementioned special prosecutor’s office and began to hold SMER politicians and associated businessmen accountable for crimes committed by them. Often heavily murmured.
However, when Fico returned to power, he quickly began to unleash a political vendetta.
V for vendetta
Opposition leaders criticize him for not only leading the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office, but also, in order to ensure impunity for his political inner circle, he wants to ensure impunity for his members. By making changes to the Criminal Code, which reflects negatively on the justice system. And which triggered further protests by the opposition, which ran under the slogan “you can’t do everything.”
The case against Fico has been dropped, and since the case was dropped while SMER was already in power, the opposition suggests that there may have been some pressure. SMER, by the way, is not particularly concerned about criticism: one of its politicians’ first moves was to raise wages for themselves. And currently SMER is making a heist on the public media in the classic style of Orban or Kaczynski, not to mention other, farther-reaching autocrats who have made propaganda machines out of state radio and television.
The Slovak parliament will vote on the media law in June, as SMER and its coalition partners have the required majority there. Thus, they will subordinate the public media to the government. And the president – Peter Pellegrini, working with Robert Fico – is likely to sign the bill.
Ukrainian nationalists vs. Russia
On the surface at least, Fico is a pro-Russian politician. From his rhetoric it seems that “Ukrainian nationalists” are to blame for the war in Ukraine, he proclaims that he is “for peace,” but by this “peace” he means the de facto subjugation of Ukraine to Russia. Moreover, it refuses to send military aid to Kiev. Interestingly, private Slovak entities can still do so.
Besides, Fico’s anti-EU and pro-Russian policies are, like those of Viktor Orban in Hungary, SMER’s biggest ally in Europe. It relies mainly just on rhetoric. Slovakia, dependent on foreign investment, cannot afford to leave the Union, which guarantees its economic and political stability, which is crucial for investors, and its authorities to close the tap on EU money.
However, it is hard not to expect criticism from the opposition in this situation. All the more so as it is echoed by the European Commission.
Bomber Juraj Cintula
However, the fact that the assassin adhered to polgovernments and values aligned with Slovakia’s progressive, liberal-left, pro-EU opposition (and, at the same time, with its ideological counterparts throughout the Western world, from other European countries to the US) has led some anti-populist and anti-authoritarian commentators to somewhat misrepresent reality: even well-known and award-winning, respected Hungarian investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi wrote on X (former Twitter) on the day of the assassination: “Wow. It appears that the man who carried out the assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, writer Juraj Cintula, was linked to the pro-Russian paramilitary group Slovenski Branci (SB). Their leader was even trained by former Spetsnaz soldiers.”
Yes, Cintula was an admirer of the SB, he liked their anti-immigrant stance. But the SBs were disbanded in 2022, and CIntula himself moved to a decidedly empathetic position with migrants.
However, it is people ideologically close to Fico, or even cooperating with him, who exploit the coup plot the most. Thus, for example, one of SMER’s ideologues and one of the party’s deputy leaders, alt-left MP and academic Ľuboš Blaha, on his channel on the Telegram app accuses the opposition in big words and many posts of having “blood on its hands” and inciting hatred. “When I told them immediately after the attack that it was their fault, they made the biggest monstrosity out of me for several days,” Blaha wrote in a post. “Only because I told them the truth.” About the liberal media, he writes that they “spread a terrible hatred of Fitsa” and “of anyone who doesn’t want war with Russia.”
The same Ľuboš Blaha who publicly called, for example, President Caputova an “American whore” and was one of the people who led to her being so vilified that she refused to run in the presidential election (which was won by a man with ties to Fica, Peter Pellegrini).
Robert Fico himself was also at it, by the way. Who, by the way, also did not mince words against his political opponents, calling them “rats,” for example.
Slovakia, Iran… Mossad
European hard-left or hard-right commentators and politicians often go further, proposing bizarre conspiracy theories. Thus, for example, Nick Griffin, a far-right British politician and former head of the fascist British National Party, claims that Mossad was behind the assassination of Robert Fico (as well as the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Ra’isi, who was killed in a helicopter crash on his country’s soil).
“A very convenient ‘accident’?” – Griffin wrote on his X (formerly Twitter) account. “Aside from the fact that Israel announced President Ra’isi’s death before it was known, and its temporal coincidence with the shooting of Robert Fico, there are questions about the apparent ‘convenience’ of this disaster […].”
Others, like Blaha, criticize the “extreme center,” such as the well-known left-wing French journalist Aude Lancelin, writing in Portal X that “the life of Robert Fico, the Slovakian president who was the victim of an attempted murder, has been saved, and this is good news. Particularly because it is one of the counterweights to the crazy bellicose excesses of the extreme center in the EU.”
Or they target liberal mainstream demonizing populists, like Gerald Grosz, an Austrian commentator and former populist-right politician, writing on X that “Robert Fico has been the victim of political and media radicalization and defamation. Orbán was immediately portrayed as a dictator. No wonder crazy killers feel justified in pulling the trigger.”
Aaron Bastani, a well-known left-wing British journalist and author of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism. A Manifesto” on the X website wrote that “Robert Fico did not pursue liberal, pro-EU policies, so it’s no wonder someone tried to shoot and kill him in cold blood.”
Russian propaganda and the assassination attempt on Robert Fico
Russian propagandists are exploiting the case of the Fica assassination very hard. Thus, for example, Margarita Simonian, editor-in-chief of the RT channel, said on the program “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” (also one of the most well-known, like Simonian, Russian propagandists) on Rossiya 1 TV that “the assassination attempt on Fitsa was disgusting but predictable,” for “this is how the West behaves.”
“Predictable, at once amazing and disgusting, but predictable if you know the history of the 20th century and the history of how the West works. It’s a coup and almost a murder of Fico. The same Fico who said that it was rampant Nazism in Ukraine that led to the “special military operation” and that Putin had no other choice. He spoke about it publicly […].” “How could this man go through so much, survive such an artificial coma, after which he will no longer be healthy. God grant that he can rule the country again […] This is an act of intimidation, this is in fact an act of terrorism. Killing him in order to intimidate others […] It was shameful,” – Simonyan said.
Simonian believes that the theory that Cintula acted alone is false, and compared the Fico assassination case to the assassination of U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, saying that “Kennedy’s assassin was killed two days after Kennedy’s assassination, and his in turn assassin later died in prison. [Kennedy is dead, his assassin is dead, the assassin’s assassin is dead. You’ll never find anything, you’ll never know anything,” and the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who, according to her, was killed because he “wanted to establish relations with Russia, tried to make friends with the USSR.”
Fake news and Cintula’s wife
A fake news story reporting that Juraj Cintula’s wife was supposed to be a “Ukrainian refugee” who persuaded her husband to take revenge on Fico for his pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian policies also made very large coverage.
It was reported, for example, that a person running a profile on the X portal called “Megatron” with 293,200 observers wrote the day after the attack that “the wife of the man who shot the Slovakian prime minister is a Ukrainian refugee and has been detained. According to local media, the 71-year-old Cintula’s wife was a refugee from Ukraine and methodically urged her husband to take revenge for Robert Fica’s rhetoric regarding Ukraine funding.” The entry was accompanied by a video allegedly showing the detention of Cintula’s Ukrainian wife.
This news, along with the video, was replicated by twitterers and appeared on the X portal in many different versions and variations.
An anti-Ukrainian, relatively small profile on X with less than five thousand followers, Hawkeye1812Z, for example, wrote that Slovak police were in possession of scrapbooks of correspondence between the terrorist’s wife and Ukrainian intelligence, while a French-language profile on X called Pascal Laurent (nearly 40 thousand followers) reported that Slovak police had found not only links between Cintula’s arrested wife and Ukrainian intelligence, but also with Soros.
PAP’s Fake Hunter Portal reported as early as May 16 that Cintula’s wife has not only not been arrested or charged with anything, but is not even any “refugee from Ukraine,” but a retired teacher. The video attached to the post and shared on many portals is not a video of the woman’s arrest, but only of her being taken to a hearing in the case.
“Information that Cintula’s wife had been arrested by the time of this report had not appeared in any Slovak news service. Instead, we found quite a few posts on social media that, in addition to her alleged complicity in the attack, she was of Ukrainian descent, and an active Maydan activist. The #FakeHunter service asked the Interior Ministry of the Slovak Republic to confirm these reports. “This information is not based on facts,” reads the response given by Lt. Col. Eng. Denisa Bárdyova of the ministry’s communications department.” – can be read on the Fake Hunter website (similar findings, by the way, can be found on other fake news verification services from different countries).
American and Ukrainian traces in Russian propaganda
“Just a few moments after the assassination, information began to appear in Russian services and social media channels that Juraj Cintula acted on the orders of American or British services. Authors of other publications proclaimed that the assassination was revenge by Ukrainians for the turning off of the arms supply tap and political statements favorable to Russia. “The information about his wife’s involvement in the attack, her roots and activities, is an attempt to outline a ‘Ukrainian trace’ in the attack, the explanation of which is in its infancy for now, which favors the spread of disinformation by the Kremlin.” – Fake Hunter reads.
However, as recently as May 19, Undaunted Megatron reported that “the Ukrainian wife of the attacker on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was detained for 72 hours while trying to leave the country. This Ukrainian citizen, who refused to take her husband’s surname after their marriage in 2020, was detained at Bratislava airport while trying to fly to Warsaw. She remained under house arrest, but refused to stay at home. Moreover, the woman violated her commitment to appear before investigators. Today the court will decide on preventive measures against her, FRWL reports” [FRWL is most often deciphered as “From Russia with Love,” the title of one of the early James Bond films].
Another thing is that pro-Ukrainian Internet users, too, happen to take advantage of the situation and prop up the “Ukrainian revenge” theory themselves, wanting – apparently – to create an image of the Ukrainian services as extremely effective, similar to the legendary Mossad. Thus, for example, Cloooud’s profile (83,000 observers) writes that “it’s a strange convergence, but people who help or support Russia in its criminal policies face serious problems. 15.05 – Prime Minister Robert Fico (wounded after being shot). 19.05 – Iranian President Raisi (died in a helicopter accident). I wonder who will be next? Take a guess and enter.”
And attached to the entry is a photo of Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov.
