Who is the populist prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, who was shot and wounded?

Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, began his decades-long political career with the violent incident that followed a Wednesday afternoon party meeting. Fico took a hit after hit.

“He is not in a life-threatening situation at this moment,” Fico’s deputy prime minister Tomas Taraba told the BBC in a later interview.

59-year-old Fico was born in 1964 in what was then Czechoslovakia. He was a fervent Communist Party member before communism fell. 1992 saw him voted to Slovakia’s parliament as a member of the Democratic Left Party after graduating from law school in 1986.

He represented the government of the Slovak Republic in 1990s cases before the European Court of Human Rights and the European Commission on Human Rights. He had spent a long period in this position. He became a key member of the Smer (Direction) party in 1999 and has been there ever since.

He and Smer are often labeled as left-wing populists, in addition to being likened to right-wing leaders such as Viktor Orbán, the nationalist prime minister of nearby Hungary.

Fico served as Slovakia’s prime minister twice previously, from 2012 to 2018 and from 2006 to 2010. In that nation, he regained power last year. He became Slovakia’s longest-serving head of state when he was elected to the EU and NATO after his third term in office.

Fico’s party, which ran on a pro-Russian and anti-American platform, won parliamentary elections last year after five years in opposition. He said that Slovakia would no longer back Ukraine militarily since that nation had resisted Russia’s full-scale invasion and had insisted that Moscow had been incited to launch a war by the US and NATO.

The moment he was elected, the new administration stopped arming Ukraine. On Slovakia’s streets, thousands of people often demonstrated against Fico’s pro-Russian policies and other proposals, such his attempts to take over the state media and change the penal code to do away with the need for a special prosecutor against corruption.

Given that Fico’s party was already marred by controversy, his opponents were worried that he and his return to power might steer Slovakia away from its pro-Western track. He vowed to enact a “sovereign” foreign policy, oppose LGBTQ+ rights, and take a hard line on immigration and non-governmental groups.

His irrational outbursts at reporters earned him attention, and in 2022, he was charged for abusing his position of authority and aiding a criminal organization. He and his government resigned in protest after the murders of Slovakian investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée in 2018. Kuciak has been covering well-known Slovakian Members of Parliament’s tax-related offenses.

Fico has one kid and is married.