Assassination attempt prompts talk of media crackdown in Slovakia - and in Hungary

On May 15, Danko was just one of the ruling coalition politicians who immediately pointed the accusing finger at the opposition and the media. In the following weeks, the whole of the ruling coalition, including Fico himself, settled on the narrative that critical media and opposition were responsible. 

In the neighbouring Hungary, government ministers quickly jumped on the same rhetoric and openly repeated the distorted information that Fico was attacked because he is a pro-peace politician in the EU.

Blaming media and western partners

The Orban regime found a way to attach the attack against Fico to the only thing that Fidesz repeated during the campaign period: war and "war psychosis" in Europe.

They exploited a mistranslation for that purpose. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, a number of foreign and Hungarian media reported that the attacker was a leftist radical, but this seems to have been a mistake caused by automatic translation technology. Cintula is from the town of Levice, which resembles the word "lavica" – the (political) Left – in many Slavic languages, so the foreign (including Hungarian) media took it to be the name of a party rather than a town.

Even after the translation error became public, Hungarian state officials – including PM Viktor Orban, or Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto – repeated that the attacker was indeed "a progressive, leftist activist". The Hungarian PM stated: „The attacker was a pro-war man. Since the left is pro-war, it is not unreasonable to say that we are dealing with a progressive, left-wing attacker."

In his first public appearance, three weeks after the attack and just a few hours before the moratorium ahead of the European elections, Fico published a 14-minute-long video on Facebook, pinning most of the blame for what happened to him on what he calls the "anti-government" media that he says is financed by US billionaire George Soros, foreign non-governmental organisations, and the opposition.

He went on to accuse large western democracies and international organisations of being unable to accept other views. As one example, he mentioned his policy of halting Slovakia's military support for Ukraine. 

"The right to a different opinion has ceased to exist in the EU," said Fico.

Crackdown on online space and media

In Slovakia, the aftermath of the Handlova attack provoked concerns about media freedom at a time when the government had already been making much-disputed changes to the public-service broadcaster.  

The ruling coalition has made it a priority to completely overhaul the publicly owned broadcaster RTVS, a step that the Orban government in Hungary has long completed. On June 20, the coalition MPs passed a much-criticised law that will basically scrap the existing institution and replace it with a new one, bearing rearranged initials: STVR. The main reshuffle is that the RTVS general director will automatically lose his job and the new CEO will be chosen by a newly created council, most of whose members will be nominees of the government.

Slovak National Party (SNS) leader Andrej Danko has promised since the attack to enact measures that will put the media and NGOs in their place. One proposal is to limit the law on free access to information, the last resort for media especially at the time when government offices refuse to communicate with some of them. They also propose to introduce the "right to correction" for ordinary citizens but also public officials, including tighter deadlines and new fines for failing to publish the correction.   

SNS MPs also propose to introduce the requirement for online media to require readers who want to write commentaries in the online discussions under their articles to provide their personal identification number (known as the birth number in Slovakia), their mobile phone number, and their address. To prove the authenticity of their personal data, readers should provide the media with a copy of their ID or passport. The proposal has stalled in the parliament before the summer break after SNS failed to garner support for their draft law from its coalition partners, but rules for the media are still being discussed and may be part of an upcoming legislative package dubbed "Lex atentát 2". 

Hungarian media regulation may also see changes in the aftermath of the attack: Máté Kocsis, the parliamentary faction leader of Fidesz mentioned potential legislative initiative to moderate comments under news articles, claiming that aggressive comments escalated to the point that Fico was attacked. In Hungary, this verbal violence, „this civil war in the virtual space," has to be stopped", he said. The authors of what Kocsis called "faceless, anonymous, inflammatory, hateful comments aimed at destroying others and the platforms that allow them to do so" must be held accountable. 

"I personally blame a lot of left-wing media in Hungary, who are masters of hate speech, incitement, biased reporting and stigmatisation of others. This includes Telex, HVG, 444."

The media that he listed are some of the few remaining independent media outlets in the country publishing critical articles about the Orbán government.