Eurasia Press & News
Recent charges laid against people linked to the security services have prompted the former premier Robert Fico to allege, without evidence, the existence of a police coup and who’s allegedly behind it.
Former three-time prime minister Robert Fico and his populist Smer party routinely warn that Slovakia’s early election set for September will be manipulated despite offering no evidence. Last week Fico went even further.
“There’s a coup happening in Slovakia,” he claimed during a press conference headlined as “Police Coup” on August 17. “The situation is changing six weeks before the election.”
The opposition leader hardened his rhetoric almost a week after Tibor Gašpar, a police chief from the era of Smer governments who was made to step down following mass protests after the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak in 2018, was detained for two days and charged with corruption. Accused of organised crime, corruption and the abuse of power in two other high-profile cases, Gašpar spent a year in custody in 2021.
Today, the former top police official is number nine on the slate of election candidates for Smer, which has been leading every opinion poll since March, threatened only by the liberal Progresívne Slovensko party.
Smer is far from being the only party disseminating narratives about the rigging of the parliamentary election set for September 30. The extremist Republika, Hlas and Slovak National (SNS) parties have also adopted them, promising parallel vote counting on the day of the election to prevent any irregularities.
While Republika and Hlas hold seats in the current parliament and are expected to win seats in the next one, SNS, led by Andrej Danko, a former parliamentary speaker who admires the duo of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, has no seats in parliament, though its rise in the polls in the past three months has put it above the necessary 5-percent threshold.
Like Gašpar and Fico, Danko and Hlas leader Peter Pellegrini, who left Smer in 2020, pronounced that the goal of the police intervention against the Smer’s number nine candidate was designed to influence the election.
One of the most conspiracy-prone nations in the region, up to 53 percent of Slovaks agreed in May that the September election could be manipulated, the Central European Digital Media Observatory found. But according to an AKO poll the following month, people’s fear of a rigged election stood at 36.2 percent, down by 4.9 percentage points from April. The fear is, nevertheless, much higher among supporters of Smer, Republika and SNS, all well above 50 percent.
Fico has already named those who he alleges are behind the attempts to rig the election and defeat Smer: the 92-year-old Jewish US financier George Soros, organisations funded by him, and President Zuzana Čaputová, who is, Fico claims, a puppet president controlled by Soros – a hate figure for populists around Central Europe.
“Big money from Soros has been invested here so that Fico will be defeated,” the ex-prime minister recently claimed while referring to himself in the third person. He warned of more attacks on the opposition that will help Progresívne Slovensko, which Čaputová used to be a member of before she became president, win the election. “Goals are precisely set,” he said.
Čaputová denied that either she or the interim technocratic government were behind Gašpar’s arrest or any other, previous or future, police operations. She further rejected the claim that she wants to destroy the opposition.
Regardless, Fico sent a warning shot in the direction of the president. “You have started a war that you can never win, and you will end up very badly,” the Smer leader said on Thursday.
Hungary accused of interference in campaign
The arrest of Gašpar also caught the attention of Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó. The very next day, the Hungarian politician claimed on social media that the “international liberal mainstream” is preying on politicians like Gašpar and Donald Trump because they defend conservative values and national interests.
“It does not shy away from any kind of harsh intervention, the deployment of police and judicial tools, if it feels its power is in danger,” Szijjártó said on August 12.
His state secretary Tamás Menczer later chimed in, saying ironically: “It is obviously, completely accidental that the politician had to be arrested 48 days before the election.”
Several Slovak politicians – including those from the Hungarian minority – and MEPs condemned Szijjártó for his criticism of the Slovak police and accused him of meddling in the country’s election campaign. Some went further and demanded Hungarian ambassador Csaba Balogh be summoned to the Foreign Ministry to explain the latest comments by Hungarian politicians, less than a month after Balogh had to explain Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s characterisation of Slovakia as Hungary’s “breakaway territory” during a festival in Romania.
Fico, an admirer of the nationalist-populist Orbán and a potential ally of isolated Hungary in the EU, was not among the critics. “I want to congratulate Minister Szijjártó on how well he described the situation,” Fico said at a press conference on August 13.
Unlike Gašpar, who has since been released on bail and denies all charges, Fico and his political ally and ex-interior minister Robert Kaliňák have had organised crime charges, which concerned the alleged obtaining and use of sensitive tax data against their political opponents, controversially scrapped by the Prosecutor General’s Office last year. The Office, which has been criticised and its reputation tarnished for cancelling the decisions of prosecutors and investigators in prominent cases under Section 363 of the Criminal Code in the past three years, scrapped another corruption charge against Kaliňák in early August.
Today, Fico also claims that the National Crime Agency (NAKA) and the Special Prosecutor’s Office will try to charge Kaliňák and himself, as well as intervene against prosecutors from the Prosecutor General’s Office and regional prosecutors, in the lead-up to the election. Last week, he predicted that Michal Aláč, head of Slovakia’s major intelligence agency (SIS), would also face charges.
And in this, Fico was right.
Top security service bosses charged; Fico sees a coup
A week after Gašpar’s arrest, on August 17, NAKA charged six more people with obstructing investigations into prominent corruption cases – mostly those from during the era of Smer governments – involving organised crime and the abuse of power.
Among those charged are Aláč, who faces a corruption charge, and his predecessor Vladimír Pčolinský. The two men, Pčolinský and Aláč, were nominated for the top post by Sme Rodina. Led by Speaker Boris Kollár, the populist party was part of the OĽaNO-led governments of the past three years. OĽaNO has long called itself an anti-corruption movement.
The current head of the National Security Authority, Roman Konečný, is also facing charges. The Authority is tasked with the protection of classified information and cybersecurity.
Although the police had been inspired by the Bible when assigning codenames to high-profile corruption cases in recent years, for instance Purgatory and Ezekiel, the police did not follow this pattern in their latest operation. Instead, they called it “Conflict Unravelling”, implying an end to the much-speculated-about internal war that’s been going on within the police service.
Dating back to 2021, the war chiefly concerns a conflict between two bodies: NAKA, which falls under the police and investigates serious crime, and the Interior Ministry’s police inspectorate, which looks into police misconduct. Prosecutors, the SIS, and even politicians have also been caught up in the war.
The conflict revolves around investigations into corruption and organised crime. Several former high-ranking police, SIS and tax authority officials from the time when Smer was in power have admitted to corruption and decided to cooperate with NAKA. A case in point: Purgatory, the most notorious high-profile case of all, is looking into allegations that Gašpar and his relative and oligarch Norbert Bödör created an organised crime group within the police, manipulated the investigation of various cases, and bribed police officers.
Subsequently, based on a leaked confidential SIS report from 2021, the police inspectorate accused several NAKA investigators dealing with Smer-linked criminal cases, grouped around investigator Ján Čurilla, of the alleged manipulation of cooperating defendants. The report provided no evidence.
The investigators are still facing the prospect of abuse-of-power charges, despite a Bratislava court saying they are unjustified. Whether the Bratislava prosecutor will actually file charges with the court, heavily based on about 7,000 hours of wiretapped recordings from the office of the charged NAKA investigators and imprecise transcripts, is expected to be announced before the parliamentary election.
Fico has long claimed that ongoing investigations linked to Smer are being manipulated.
Political analyst Jozef Lenč from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University notes that these investigations and prosecutions are unlikely to have any impact on Smer voters. “They believe that the prosecuted Smer politicians and candidates are victims of opposition persecution,” he explains.
Fico regularly questions the credibility of cooperating defendants, and uses edited audio files and transcripts at press conferences to discredit them, the special prosecutors and the accused NAKA investigators.
“A group of criminals at NAKA and prosecutors from the Special Prosecutor’s Office have participated in the liquidation of the opposition since 2020,” Fico repeated last week. In 2020, OĽaNO won the election and promised to “untie the hands of the police” so it could investigate high-level corruption.
Fico added that, in addition to the accused investigators and special prosecutors, Progresívne Slovensko and Zuzana Čaputová have benefited from the attacks on the opposition.
The Smer leader has suggested that the accused NAKA investigators might disclose who gave the orders to act against the opposition as soon as they read the indictments against them. “This [disclosure] is a tragedy that they [Čaputová, special prosecutors, political opponents] could not imagine,” Fico said, claiming that the president and Progresívne Slovensko are now trying not only to destroy Smer to win the election, but also to take over all branches of the security services to keep themselves out of trouble.
As for the latest police intervention, Fico described it as “one desperate attempt by the president and the entire gang” to change the situation before the parliamentary election.
Consequently, Fico has demanded the removal of police chief Štefan Hamran, whom he called an “untouchable Indian holy cow” protected by the president. Hamran was appointed police chief by OĽaNO. The opposition points to his links to Progresívne Slovensko based on a 2019 photo that shows Hamran with the party’s former leader, Michal Truban.
In light of the recent police operations, Čaputová called a meeting of the Security Council on Friday. “There is no police coup in Slovakia – only criminal investigations that are ongoing,” the president concluded.
At the same time, Čaputová stressed that contrary to Fico’s claims, neither she nor interim Prime Minister Ľudovít Ódor are briefed on any police operations, nor do they approve them. This lie, she continued, will be added to the list of other lies that Fico has spread about her publicly. Fico has repeatedly called Čaputová an American agent and Soros’s president. In May, the president mentioned legal steps that she plans to take against Fico in the near future.
Mystery meeting and Fico’s letter to NATO
Čaputová, who has announced she will not seek re-election in 2024, also called on Slovak citizens to join electoral ward election commissions and check the progress of the September election amid the claims about stolen elections coming from populists and extremists.
Various mechanisms and some 6,000 electoral ward election commissions make vote rigging virtually impossible in Slovakia, experts say.
Even so, Smer politicians maintained in May that somebody from the then-government sent a group of 25 Slovaks, ranging from public servants to NGO workers, to Brussels in mid-April to ask EU and NATO representatives to intervene in the upcoming election and against the Slovak opposition. The party said it had obtained unofficial documents from the Defence Ministry that back up its claims on what it calls the “Slovak Watergate” scandal. Fico also suspects the involvement of President Čaputová, as the then-Eduard Heger government was an interim one and did not possess full competences.
Yet the truth was more prosaic: it turned out that those people had attended a seminar on disinformation and hybrid threats, and asked the EU and NATO representatives to provide Slovakia with counter-hybrid support teams.
In early June, Fico also spied a problem in a planned NATO public awareness campaign, “Why Ukraine Matters”, which was supposed to highlight the importance of NATO for the security of Slovakia. Fico wrote a letter to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in which he claimed that the campaign could be considered “an intervention in the election campaign to damage the opposition”, as it targets Smer voters who may have a view on the war in Ukraine different from NATO’s. Smer does not support military support for Ukraine. Therefore, Fico asked NATO to postpone the campaign until after the election.
Fico has been talking of manipulated elections since March. He claimed back then that “the possibility of falsifying the results of parliamentary elections is imminent”. The threat is three times higher than six months ago, he alleged at the weekend.
Yet Smer has also been on the receiving end of this conspiracy theory. The former defence minister Jaroslav Naď (Demokrati) in late May spoke of a potentially rigged election after a Slovak citizen reportedly travelled to Moscow to collect money to be spent on the manipulation of elections in favour of Smer. Naď has not since provided any more details, because, he says, it’s classified information.
Smer inevitably denied the allegation, with Fico laughing it off, claiming that Vladimir Putin had called him and asked him how many percentage points Smer needed to win the election. “I told him, ‘There is no need, we will rig it ourselves but a few million euros would come in handy’,” joked Fico.
Daniel Milo, head of the Interior Ministry’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, told Aktuality.sk that election fraud is a very dangerous topic. In its 2022 report on disinformation, the police noted that Slovakia could see riots similar to the ones seen in the US in January 2021 after the September election.
“In the event of dissatisfaction by a certain part of the political spectrum, the results of the election may be questioned, which could turn into organised riots and attacks on state institutions,” Milo said.
