Slovakia, shaken on Wednesday after the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico, is a relatively young country whose history is closely linked to that of its central European neighbors.
Slovakia is one of two nations that emerged from the former Czechoslovakia amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 20th century.
Czechoslovakia was a multi-ethnic nation created at the end of World War I that was dismembered by the Nazis and more than four decades of communist rule. But during the fall of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when independence movements gained strength throughout the Soviet Union, a series of largely peaceful protests called the “Velvet Revolution” led Czechoslovakia first to independence, then to a split, often called the “Velvet Revolution”. Velvet Divorcetwo nations remained: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
After several years of economic and political upheaval following its independence, Slovakia joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, and adopted the euro in 2009. As the country navigated toward establishing its national identitysome tensions remained with the Czech Republic, its richer and bigger neighborwhich has approximately twice the population of Slovakia, which is five million.
Like much of Europe, Slovakia has been deeply polarized over the past decade. Mr. Fico, who has been a leading politician in the country since its independence, was forced to resign from office in 2018, amid widespread protests over the killing of a journalist who was investigating government corruption.
He was re-elected last fall, after adopt a pro-Russian campaign stance which capitalized on Slovakia’s historic Russian sympathies.
