Robert Fico | News, Politics, Slovakia, Prime Minister, & Political Views

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Robert Fico (born September 15, 1964, Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia [now in Slovakia]) is the prime minister of Slovakia, winning his most recent term in 2023. Since 2006 he has held the office four times and served for a total of 15 years, longer than any other prime minister in Slovakia’s history. In 1999 Fico helped found the political party Direction–Social Democracy, known as SMER (smer is Slovak for “direction”), which he still leads. A veteran politician, Fico has survived political setbacks, corruption scandals, and an assassination attempt in his long career. Since 2018 he has been pursuing a more authoritarian, nationalistic path.

Early life

Fico was born into a working-class family. After graduating from the Topoľčany gymnasium in 1982, he entered law school at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, where his ambition and confidence impressed his teachers. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in criminal law in 1992 at the Institute of State and Law of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and in 2002 completed his postgraduate work at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London.

Fico had only moderate political success from 1989 until 2006. After the Communist Party collapsed in 1989, Fico joined the Party of the Democratic Left (Strana Demokratické Levice; SDL), which had emerged out of the now-defunct Communist Party, and was elected a member of Czechoslovakia’s parliament in 1992. Slovakia became independent on January 1, 1993, and starting in 1994 Fico served as the country’s legal counsel to the European Court of Human Rights. However, in 1998 the SDL deemed him too young to become the party’s general prosecutor and endorsed another candidate instead. Frustrated by what he saw as a corrupt, ineffective system, Fico left the SDL to form SMER, with himself as its leader.

Becoming prime minister

Over the next seven years, Fico’s increasing popularity and the merger of several left-wing parties with SMER culminated in his party’s strong showing in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Fico was able to form a coalition government and won his first term as prime minister of Slovakia (2006–10). Under Fico’s governance, Slovakia adopted the euro as a national currency and joined the Schengen Agreement, which abolished internal border checks with member states. However, his term was plagued by a corruption scandal involving one of his coalition partners, as well as the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession. Slovakia’s economy was heavily dependent on its exports, which severely contracted during the crisis. By 2010 Fico’s coalition no longer had a majority in parliament, and he lost his office.

Over the next two years, Fico successfully worked to restore his own and SMER’s popularity. In the 2012 elections SMER became the first single party in Slovak history to win a decisive majority in parliament. Fico became prime minister for a second term (2012–16). Though he failed in his 2014 bid for the presidency of Slovakia, he found a way to bolster his political platform by taking a hardline stance against mass migration into Slovakia.

In the 2016 parliamentary elections SMER held enough seats that Fico was able to form a coalition government and win a third term as prime minister (2016–18). When the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016 and Slovakia assumed the rotating EU presidency, Fico led efforts to reaffirm the bloc’s 27-nation solidarity and to strengthen migration controls and national borders. While winning international approval for his leadership, Fico suffered a scandal at home. In 2018 an investigative journalist, Ján Kuciak, had linked several state officials and businessmen close to Fico’s administration to organized crime. That year Kuciak and his fiancée were murdered, stunning the public and launching nationwide protests that eventually forced Fico to resign as prime minister.

In 2020 SMER split along ideological lines, and Fico took his wing of the party in a more nationalistic, populist, and conservative direction. His rhetoric became more strident and aggressive toward his opponents and the media, and he bitterly fought government measures to curb COVID-19 infections. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Fico supported the Russian claim that Ukraine had provoked the conflict. Political upheaval in parliament forced a snap election in 2023 in which SMER once again won the largest number of seats. On October 25 Fico became Slovakia’s prime minister for the fourth time. He survived an assassination attempt in May 2024 and since then has continued to consolidate his hold on the government.

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