Dmitry A. Medvedev, a former Russian president and frequent forecaster of a third world war, did not hesitate to compare the would-be assassin of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico to the young man who started World War I. was once again on the brink.
The person who shot Mr. Fico, a nationalist leader who favored friendly relations with Russia, was “a certain topsy-turvy version of Gavrilo Princip,” Mr. Medvedev said on television. social network. Princip was a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, sparked what Churchill called “the harshest, the cruelest” of all wars.
It was on many levels a crazy association to make. The Europe of empires that collapsed between 1914 and 1918 is long gone, as is the Europe that replaced it and produced Auschwitz. In their place, the carefully constructed European Union of 27 members, including Slovakia, was established with the overarching goal of making war impossible on a long-ravaged continent.
Yet with just three weeks until the European Parliament elections, the worrying signs of smoldering violence go well beyond the shooting of Mr Fico, whose condition remains serious.
A 27-month-old war rages in Ukraine, outside the EU but right on its doorstep. It is increasingly, as during the First World War, a conflict involving soldiers reduced to “fodder locked in the same murderous quagmire, sharing the same wear of bullets and barrages, the same disease and deprivation, torment and terror,” as Tim Butcher says in his book. book “The Trigger,” an account of Princip’s life.
In many ways, Russia is waging its war in Ukraine against Europe’s liberal democracies. The question raised by the attack on Mr Fico is how far Europeans are prepared to go to wage war against themselves, when extreme political polarization is rampant in their societies.
The motive for the shooting remains unclear, but it took place in the context of a poisoned political environment that the assassination attempt will only make even more toxic, at least in Slovakia, but potentially beyond.
Europe is increasingly divided, and dangerously so. As in Slovakia, this division pits nationalists opposed to immigration against liberals who see the far right as a threat to the rule of law, press freedom and democracy itself. In this political world, there are no more opponents, there are only enemies. All means are good to attack them, up to and including violence, as recent events indicate.
With so much political tension, a single spark can be explosive. The attempted assassination of Mr. Fico “demonstrates what such polarization can lead to, and this is something that European societies, and the United States too, need to think about,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist. in central Europe.
The war outside Europe and the political battles within it fuel each other. Russian advances on the battlefield, an apparent Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea, and a possible NATO deployment of trainers to Ukraine are reminders that escalation is always possible. The shooting of Mr. Fico also demonstrated this.
Mr. Fico opposes European Union power, military aid to Ukraine, mass immigration and LGBTQ rights. He is hated by liberals for these reasons and more. He is unpopular in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, but popular outside it. In this, his political fortunes are consistent with the divide in societies like France, Germany and the Netherlands, where the central fight is now national versus global.
It contrasts the forgotten people living “nowhere” in brownfields and rural areas, who see immigrants as a threat to their livelihoods, with the prosperous, connected global citizens living in the “somewhere” of the economy of the knowledge.
The war in Ukraine deepens these fissures because nationalists across Europe are aligned with the reactionary moral ideology of President Vladimir V. Putin. They join him and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in portraying Western liberal urban elites as agents bent on destroying the church, the nation, the family, and traditional notions of marriage and gender.
Mr. Medvedev called the would-be assassin in Slovakia, who has not been identified beyond being a 71-year-old retiree, a representative of “the Europe of detestable degenerates who do not do not know their own history” which Mr. Fico fought against. .
His shooting appears to reflect the narrowing of the middle ground in political confrontations in Europe. “You could be attacked psychologically, verbally or physically because of what you do or say,” said Karolina Wigura, a Polish historian of ideas. “In our societies, it has become unbearable to accept that someone else sees or defines something in a completely different way. »
On Thursday, Donald Tusk, the liberal Polish Prime Minister who returned to power at the end of last year after defeating the ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, posted on a threat from the day before: “Today the Slovaks gave us an example of what to do with Donald Tusk if he dismisses the PCK. »
This was a reference to a large airport project favored by Law and Justice, but called into question by the new government.
When Mr. Tusk took office in December, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, president of Law and Justice and Poland’s de facto leader since 2015, called him a “German agent.” Such accusations, in effect of treason, became commonplace throughout Europe. The air is full of “Jewish agents” and “Russian agents.” In the current campaign for the European Parliament elections, Mr Tusk and Mr Kaczynski have exchanged accusations of “Russian spies”.
Slovak Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok warned this week that “we are on the verge of a civil war.”
Political violence is not limited to Slovakia. This month in Germany, four people attacked Matthias Ecke, a prominent Social Democratic politician who was hanging campaign posters in Dresden, leaving him with a broken cheekbone and eye socket that required emergency surgery. Mr Ecke is standing for re-election to the European Parliament.
Rapid technological change, the proliferation of social media outlets for blame, and the crumbling of any agreed-upon notion of truth have all contributed to civility succumbing to brutality.
“There is a pervasive sense of loss,” Ms. Wigura said. “Difference becomes a threat.”
But the main factor in this slide towards violent clashes has probably been the rapid increase in immigration – some 5.1 million immigrants entered the European Union in 2022, more than double the number of previous year – which sharply divided opinion across the continent.
“The European Union is seen as incapable of protecting its own borders,” Mr Rupnik said. “That led to nations saying, OK, we have to do this ourselves.”
It has also led, in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Slovakia itself, to the rapid rise of xenophobic far-right parties singing chauvinistic anthems of national glory. They often have roots in fascism, but without its militarism and cult of personality, at least until now. The barriers that once prevented these parties – like the Alternative for Germany or the National Rally in France – from coming to power have eroded or collapsed.
These parties are expected to perform well in the June 9 elections to the European Parliament, which is a relatively powerless but nonetheless important institution as it is the only directly elected body with representatives from all European Union countries. In France, polls show Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally getting about double the votes of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party.
The climate was flammable before the assassination attempt on Mr. Fico; this is more the case now. The realm of possibility has expanded. Post-war Europe has a culture of peace, already shaken by the war in Ukraine. He is not used to his leaders being targeted in this way. Nearly four decades have passed since the assassination of Olof Palme, Sweden’s social democratic prime minister, in Stockholm in 1986.
“I don’t know about World War III,” Ms. Wigura said, “but it’s not looking good.” There are fewer and fewer spaces where you can express your opinion. The situation is much more dangerous than it was.
The peaceful normality of post-war Europe seemed unshakeable, the painful lessons of history having been learned. But as Russia’s revanchist war in Ukraine demonstrated, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was ultimately not without bloodshed. It seems that the malevolent ghosts of Europe have awakened.
