Robert Fico, 59, has played a central role in Slovak politics since the country’s independence in 1993 and served as prime minister longer than any other leader.
The country gained independence after the so-called Velvet Revolution, a series of popular, nonviolent protests in 1989 against the Communist Party in what was then still Czechoslovakia.
Mr. Fico, who was a member of the Communist Party while in power, founded the Smer party in the late 1990s and began the first of his three terms as prime minister in 2006, remaining for four years before moving in opposition after his coalition. lost an election. Slovakia is a landlocked country of around 5 million inhabitants.
The Smer party, which started on the political left but increasingly adopted right-wing views on immigration and cultural issues, governed as part of a coalition. Much of the international discussion about Mr. Fico’s leadership in recent years has focused on his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Slovakia’s southern neighbor.
Mr. Fico returned to power in 2012, but resigned as prime minister in July 2018 following massive protests following the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, who exposed government corruption. The protests that shook the country were the largest since the Velvet Revolution; demonstrators demanded the resignation of the government and new elections.
Slovakia occupies an important place in independent assessments of press freedom, but protesters also sought deeper changes in the country overseen by Mr. Fico.
He returned to power in last fall’s elections, forming a coalition government after receiving about 23 percent of the vote, having campaigned against sanctions imposed on Russia after the start of its full-scale invasion of the Ukraine in February 2022. the country’s munitions should be sent to Ukraine, he told voters.
This position, in a country where pro-Russian sentiment has always been high, worried European leaders in Brussels, who said they feared that Slovakia could form a pro-Russian alliance with Mr. Orban and, potentially, with Italian leader Georgia Meloni, this would hamper support for Ukraine within the European Union. At the time, it was also seen as a sign of the apparent erosion of the pro-Ukrainian bloc that Europe had formed after the invasion.
Slovakia’s military contributions to Ukraine were negligible compared to those of countries like the United States and Great Britain. But last year it became one of several European Union countries bordering Ukraine in block imports of its grain, fearing that this would harm Slovak farmers.
In April, an ally of Mr. Fico, Peter Pellegrini, won a vote to become president of Slovakia. The stance is largely ceremonial, but analysts say the victory strengthened the grip of Russia-friendly political forces in central Europe, given that Mr. Pellegrini opposed military and financial aid to Ukraine.
