Robert Fico
Robert Fico has been prime minister of Slovakia three times, in 2006-10, 2012-18 and since October 2023, the longest-serving in the country's history, the lawyer who left the post-Communist party in 1999 to found Smer, Direction, as a party of the social-democratic left that governed with the nationalists and then became one. He took Slovakia into the euro in January 2009 in his first government, the first of the Visegrád four. He took it out of the Western consensus on Ukraine in his third, stopping the state's arms deliveries in his first week. He visited Putin in Moscow in December 2024 and stood beside him on Red Square in May 2025, the only European Union leader to do either. On 15 May 2024, after a cabinet meeting in the town of Handlová, a seventy-one-year-old poet shot him five times at close range. He survived four hours of surgery and came back two months later blaming the opposition and the liberal media, and governing harder. The second government ended in March 2018 when the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée were shot in their home while he was writing about the Italian mafia's connections to the prime minister's office, and the largest demonstrations since 1989 forced Fico out, though not his party. The businessman convicted of ordering the murder was acquitted, twice. He was born in Topoľčany in 1964, studied law at Comenius University, joined the Communist Party in 1987, worked at the justice ministry's law institute and represented the state at the European Court of Human Rights. He sat in parliament for the Party of the Democratic Left from 1992 until he left it. The third government, with the nationalists and Pellegrini's party, has abolished the special prosecutor's office that had charged his allies, cut the penalties for corruption, replaced the public broadcaster, put the non-governmental organisations under a foreign agents' law. It has shifted the constitution to say that there are two sexes. It has kept the country in the European Union and NATO while saying that both should leave Ukraine alone. The demonstrations of Slovakia is Europe have filled the squares since January 2025 and have not moved him. He has said that he learned in hospital that the country needs peace. He has governed as though it needed him.
- Lived: 1964 CE – ?
- Nationality: Slovak
- Roles: prime minister, politician
