Polarization plagues Europe, where the specter of political violence looms. The assassination attempt on Wednesday of the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico, which has shaken the Central European country and all of Europe, fuels fears that the current inflamed atmosphere in a good number of Member States will have catastrophic results. The attack against Fico, a few weeks before key elections for the future of the EU, is the latest chapter in a wave of attacks on politicians in the West, which has set off all the alarms about the increase in hate speech, populism and social division. This reality, which was deepened after the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic and the various crises that hit the continent, threatens democracy and represents a breeding ground for foreign interference, experts and EU leaders warn.
In recent months, political violence has left a trail of cases throughout Europe, such as the attack two weeks ago on the German Social Democratic MEP Matthias Ecke—which is being investigated as perpetrated by young people related to the extreme right. This worrying phenomenon coincides with a turbulent moment in the EU, with Russia’s war against Ukraine very hot, the crisis in the Middle East with no signs of subsiding and a dynamic that points to the rise of far-right parties, which draw on social division. .
“We must have zero tolerance for any type of violence or hate speech of any kind in Europe,” the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, warns EL PAÍS. “Invisible and undemocratic external forces will take advantage of any opportunity to incite further discord and misinformation in our society. It is the responsibility of each of us to take a step back to reflect and remember what unites us. We must take advantage of what keeps us united, not what divides us,” adds the Belgian politician.
At the beginning of the year, Michel experienced one of those waves of fury—verbal—when he announced that he would leave his position to run in the European elections in June. The attacks and idle talk against him and his family made him give up on his plans, he said. The political anger has moved to the social field in many countries. A few weeks ago, the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, spoke about this mess when taking a few days to reflect on his future. Before him, Sigrid Kaag, Finance Minister of the Netherlands, resigned in the face of intimidation that had already led to greater police protection.
In Slovakia itself, Zuzana Caputová, president between 2019 and 2024, announced last year that she would not run for re-election after receiving numerous threats against her and her family; also by Smer, Fico’s party.
Illiberal winds in eastern Europe
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A 2023 report from Goethe University Frankfurt, coordinated by researcher Anna Pless, analyzes how polarized Europe is and differentiates between socio-political polarization and polarization of attitudes towards issues such as immigration, the environment or gender-related issues. Her analysis, which is based on surveys in member states, concludes that polarization is greatest in southern and eastern Europe, where a wave of illiberalism is rampant in countries like Hungary.
In fact, it has been commonplace in Slovakia (a country with 5.4 million inhabitants, a member of the EU since 2007), where the country has already experienced with shock the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak — who had investigated the Government’s connections with the Italian mafia and led to the resignation of Fico, then also prime minister—and his fiancée in 2018. The incoming Slovak president, Peter Pellegrini, called on the parties this Thursday to suspend the pre-election campaign.
But polarization, social fury and discontent are also flowing in other places after the trauma of the covid-19 pandemic, the economic crises that fueled social inequality and that still reverberate. In this climate, which facilitates radicalization, conspiracy theories, anti-vaccines and hatred against those who think differently flow.
This Wednesday’s assassination attempt on Fico raises the tension in Europe many degrees and the threat of violence in a club unaccustomed to it despite the fact that the continent has not been totally immune to assassinations in the last 50 years. The Slovak case leads European experts and leaders to take stock of the situation.
The Slovakian Fico, a national-populist politician with positions similar to Moscow, is one of the 27 leaders who sit in the European Council. Never has a sitting member of the Sanhedrin that runs the EU been assassinated. There have been assassinations of prime ministers in Europe while they held office: that of the Spanish Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973, president of the Government in the Franco dictatorship (who died a victim of a totally different phenomenon: terrorism, in this case ETA); that of the charismatic Swedish social democrat Olof Palme in 1986; and that of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. None were members of the Council. Spain and Sweden were not part of the Union at that time; Serbia remains a candidate for accession.
Ignacio Molina, an analyst at the Elcano Institute, recalls that assassinations are a phenomenon that, except for some more recent cases – such as the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003 – seemed, rather, a thing of the past.
The wave of assassinations of political leaders was especially intense between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, especially due to attacks from anarchist circles. Another turbulent period spanned from the 1960s, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and, in Europe, an attempt to kill the French general Charles de Gaulle, until the late 1980s, with the assassination of the Swede Olof Palme. It was a turbulent period in which assassinations or attempted assassinations of political leaders multiplied, including Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan.
“In historical terms we are clearly in a better moment. But it is still very worrying, without dramatizing it,” Molina points out by phone. “Are we worse than ever? No, we are probably better than ever, but precisely for that reason, and knowing that in the past there has been a lot of political violence, when there is a breeding ground for radicalization it is dangerous to enter into these dynamics,” warns the expert.
An assassination, precisely, marked the beginning of the great european civil war that devastated the continent in two parts between 1914 and 1945: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in July 1914. There were others, such as that of the German Prime Minister Walter Rathenau in 1922. But then the era of peace began, the great moderate era in which the European Union was born, a project that sought to be a guarantee of peace in a continent shaken by the two world wars. Now, it is in full transformation in the face of a new geopolitical panorama marked by the threat of new wars.
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