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Slovakia’s Eurosceptic premier Robert Fico is under increased pressure from opposition parties, street protests and the EU not to go ahead with plans to close down the country’s anti-corruption office.
Lawmakers of Fico’s three-party coalition, who hold a combined parliamentary majority, were expected to push through the controversial judicial overhaul on Wednesday, but MPs from the liberal opposition have succeeded in postponing the vote.
The reform, which would de facto end several high-profile cases, is deeply unpopular, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets on Thursday night in Bratislava and other cities. Brussels has warned Fico against the move — and so has the country’s president.
So far Fico has not budged, insisting that the overhaul would be implemented by mid-March. His coalition lawmakers say they will attempt to adopt it next week.
In addition to closing the special prosecutor’s office that focuses on fraud and graft cases, Fico’s reform would soften penalties for white collar crime and reduce the timeframe in which they can be prosecuted. This could end several high-profile cases in the ruling Smer party and its coalition partners. Fico himself was investigated by the office, which dropped the charges against him in 2022.
Soon after he came back to power last year, Fico pledged to shut down the prosecutor’s office, claiming that its head, Daniel Lipšic, was spreading “evil” rather than uncovering crimes.
The EU commission has threatened to launch legal proceedings and the European Public Prosecutor’s office, which pursues fraud and corruption cases with EU funds, has warned that if the reform was adopted, the “level of protection of the [EU’s] financial interests . . . in the Slovak Republic would decrease steeply”.
The country’s liberal opposition has accused Fico of undermining the judiciary and President Zuzana Čaputová called his plan “inadmissible”. She can block bills that are adopted by Fico’s majority, but her veto can be overturned by another parliamentary vote.
In recent weeks, tens of thousands have been gathering every Thursday in Bratislava, while smaller demonstrations have also been held in other Slovak cities and in the neighbouring Czech capital Prague.
The demonstrations have been reminiscent of those in 2018 that followed the killings of a journalist and his fiancée. The journalist, Ján Kuciak, had been probing Smer’s ties to criminal networks and Slovak businesses at the time of his murder.
The protests led to Fico’s ousting from what was then his third term as prime minister. He returned to office after elections last year in which he campaigned on a populist platform. But he has since U-turned on some of his pre-election pledges, notably his promise to end arms shipments to Ukraine.
Fico’s reform is likely to have an impact on several ongoing corruptions cases involving senior politicians and officials, including by limiting the timeframe in which cases can be prosecuted to a maximum of five years from currently up to 20 years. After its closure, the cases pursued by the special prosecutor’s office will be distributed among other prosecutors who are grappling with a substantial workload and lack experience with specific issues such as corruption.
The dropped charges against Fico and his deputy prime minister Robert Kaliňák related to allegations that the two had ordered the disclosure of confidential tax documents to discredit Smer’s political rivals.
Among the other Smer politicians under investigation by the special prosecutor is Tibor Gašpar, described by Fico as “one of the hottest candidates” to take charge of the Slovak intelligence service. Gašpar was indicted for alleged links to organised crime dating back to his time as Slovakia’s police chief. He denied having such links and resigned from law enforcement in 2018, after Kuciak’s murder.
The office also launched investigations into officials affiliated with other parties. The governor of the central bank, Peter Kažimír, was charged in 2021 in a case relating to an alleged bribe for a former senior tax official. Kažimír is a former Smer politician who served as Fico’s finance minister in a previous administration. The deputy speaker of parliament and former economy minister, Peter Žiga, was separately charged in 2020 in a case involving an alleged bribe to a judge. Both have denied wrongdoing.
Radovan Pala, a partner in the Slovak office of law firm Taylor Wessing, said Fico’s government was “weakening the competences of the investigators and complicating the criminal procedure” at a time when Slovakia “cannot be counted among the countries with swift detection and punishing of crimes, particularly sophisticated ones”.
