Today the circle closes. Andrej Danko openly claims that the prime minister was “scared” by the interview with Donald Trump, and that is why he is going to France to see Macron. Robert Fico refused to answer when asked if he was scared after the conversation with Trump. At the same time, after months of insults against the EU and its leaders, the need for a “broad agenda” and a return to the game suddenly appears on the prime minister’s table.
From the core to the periphery
It is very likely also related to the call of German MEP Dennis Radtke from the CDU to build a new European security architecture “without Fico and Orbán”. It’s not about symbolism. It is another political signal that a significant part of European states are already considering formats in which “problematic” prime ministers are simply not taken into account.
This development is in complete contrast to what Robert Fico promoted during his third government. Before the meeting with Emmanuel Macron and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern on July 21, 2017, he declared that Slovakia is ready to be a part of the European core, given the real economic and financial indicators, and that it is in Slovakia’s national interest to be part of the decisions that will form this core.
He boasted about the good results of the Slovak economy as an argument why Slovakia should belong to the core of the EU. Today, under his fourth government, the reality is the opposite. Slovakia finds itself at the tail end of the EU in terms of growth, inflation, fiscal and institutional indicators.
While in 2017 it was possible to talk about the core with a great degree of justification, not only because of the numbers, but also because of the clear support of the voters of Smer for Slovakia’s membership in the EU and the trust that Robert Fico had in the EU bodies and among the prime ministers and presidents of the member states after the successful first Slovak presidency in the EU, today it is completely different.
We are pushed from the core to the periphery by the government’s bad foreign and European policy, which is full of insults to the EU and slandering it in front of enemy states, but also the poor performance of the state at home. If the electorate of the ruling parties, which in dramatically large numbers is oriented towards “slovexit”.
How to get out of a dead end
At the same time, nothing has changed in the essentials: Slovakia’s national interest is really to be part of the core of the European Union. But Fico’s false sovereignty “on all four sides of the world”, combined with ineffective governance, moved us from the core to the periphery. It’s laughable if it wasn’t painful for the vast majority of citizens: Our prime minister suddenly wants to be where he’s already been and where he cut himself off from.
In February 2024, he was at the table in Paris. Today, after two years of sovereignist wrangling at home and slandering the EU even in front of its enemies, he is going to Macron to repair the damage and convince him and Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Slovakia is still worth not being thrown overboard.
As a nation and a state, we are at a crossroads. It is probably time for the president of the republic to convene a round table of representatives of parliamentary parties to discuss how the Slovak Republic should behave in this uncertain period.
How can he avoid another national disaster and not find himself in the gray zone, which is the object of Russia’s interest in expanding its sphere of influence. How can it break out of the impasse in which it has found itself and use the formation of a new European order to strengthen its security and further modernize.
