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Slovakia’s Eurosceptic prime minister Robert Fico has pushed through parliament his plan to shut the country’s anti-corruption office, despite street protests and EU warnings that this would undermine the rule of law.
Lawmakers from Fico’s three-party coalition, who hold a combined parliamentary majority, on Thursday adopted a controversial legal reform that could effectively end several high-profile legal cases, some of which have targeted officials from the prime minister’s Smer party and its coalition partners. Fico himself has been investigated by the office, which dropped the charges against him in 2022.
In addition to closing down the special prosecutor’s office that focuses on fraud cases, Fico’s reform is set to weaken penalties for white-collar crime and reduce the timeframe within which they can be prosecuted.
Fico’s reform “plays into the hands of the perpetrators, not the victims” of white-collar crime, said Xenia Makarova from Let’s Stop Corruption, a Slovak anti-graft group.
The prosecutor’s office will now close on March 20, after 78 out of 150 lawmakers approved the change late on Thursday. The liberal opposition boycotted the vote.
The judicial overhaul had been fast-tracked by Fico’s government without consulting relevant legal experts and “despite the protests of tens of thousands of people throughout Slovakia”, said Makarova. “It is therefore questionable if the government is pushing for quick change because its own politicians and related businessmen face investigations and lawsuits.”
In December, two months after taking power, Fico said the office should be closed because its chief, Daniel Lipšic, was allegedly spreading “evil” rather than uncovering crimes. The European Commission then threatened to launch legal proceedings if Fico went ahead with his plan.
The European Public Prosecutor’s office, which pursues fraud and corruption cases affecting EU funds, also warned that the reform would “decrease steeply” the “level of protection of the [EU’s] financial interests” in Slovakia. One of the anti-corruption office’s tasks has been to monitor the disbursement of EU funds.
The country’s liberal opposition managed to delay the vote for several days, but could not stop its adoption on Thursday. President Zuzana Čaputová, who called Fico’s manoeuvre “inadmissible”, has the power to block bills, but the coalition majority can then override any veto through another parliamentary vote.
The recent street demonstrations have mirrored the larger ones in 2018 that followed the killings of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée. He had been probing Smer’s ties to criminal networks and Slovak business at the time of his murder.
The protests led to Fico’s ousting, but he returned to office to start a fourth mandate as premier after elections last year in which he also campaigned against migration and against imposing more sanctions on Russia. Fico last month performed a U-turn on the latter issue and pledged to maintain help for Ukraine.
The closure of the anti-corruption office means that its caseload will be distributed among other prosecutors with less experience of such issues.
The Socialists and Democrats group in the European parliament suspended Fico’s Smer party and its ally Hlas from its EU-wide political family in October after Fico formed his government with the populist Slovak National party.
Gabriele Bischoff, vice-president of the S&D group, said that there should be “no difference” in how the EU has behaved towards Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán over weakening the rule of law — where it has frozen the disbursal of funds to the country — and its response to Fico’s overhaul of the judiciary in Slovakia. “It’s the same style and mechanisms that are happening”. Fico’s reform was a “violation of our values, of our rule”, said Bischoff.
Additional reporting by Alice Hancock in Strasbourg
