At the Roosevelt hospital in Banská Bystrica, the city in central Slovakia where the Prime Minister, Robert Fico, was taken after suffering an attack last Wednesday, health personnel come and go while the press waits for news about the most watched patient in Europe .
Fico, 59, was brought to this university hospital by helicopter after being shot five times at point-blank range by a politically motivated assailant in Handlová, a nearby town where the prime minister had met with members of the Government. His condition was so extremely serious that it was decided to hospitalize him in Banská Bystrica instead of transferring him to the capital, Bratislava, located 215 kilometers away.
On that first night he feared for his life. Two surgical teams, one specialized in general surgery and the other in traumatology, operated on him for five hours and managed to stabilize him. Yesterday, two days after the attack, Robert Fico underwent surgery again, this time for two hours.
“The objective of the second operation was to extract necrotic tissues that had remained inside the patient; a CT scan was performed to locate them; Now he is conscious and stable in the intensive care unit, but his situation continues to be very serious,” said the hospital director, Miriam Lapuniková, in a brief appearance before journalists stationed outside the health center.
Speaking next to her was Robert Kalinák, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, who had just visited Fico and who is becoming a kind of interim spokesman for the Executive in this dramatic situation. “He has undergone a two-hour operation; “His condition is still very serious, it will undoubtedly take several days to see how he evolves, but there is progress, I have seen progress,” said Kalinák, more optimistic than after his first visit to Fico on Thursday, from which he emerged looking very gloomy.
Robert Kalinák, a member of Smer-SSD, Fico’s populist social democratic party, also wanted to emphasize that the Government continues to work. “The Ministries are working in all their functions, nothing is frozen or stopped, the country continues; The State is stable and today the patient is also stable,” he assured.
A medical board will meet on Monday to re-evaluate Robert Fico’s conditions and consider whether he remains hospitalized in Banská Bystrica or whether he will be transferred to a hospital in Bratislava, his place of residence. “Roosevelt Hospital has all the appropriate medical capabilities to care for the patient,” said Kalinák, including a cardiology team if necessary, since Robert Fico has had heart failure in the past and therefore takes medication regularly. “It is still early to decide on the transfer to Bratislava, since the patient must be stabilized and that must be his will,” said the hospital director, Miriam Lapuniková.
Meanwhile, Slovak society and in particular its political class digest the shock of an assassination attempt that has generated fears of more politically motivated violence in this country of 5.4 million inhabitants, where intense and angry polarization has reigned for years. , to which Robert Fico himself has contributed decisively with his acrid rhetoric. “In Slovakia there are two political camps and there is a lot of hatred; The situation was such that something could happen, and in the end the situation has escalated to this attack,” summarizes a 34-year-old woman – she prefers not to give her name – who has come to the hospital to visit an admitted relative. “But this division and polarization of people also exists in Europe, and I think it is a global thing, it happens a little everywhere.”
In Slovak society and politics, Robert Fico has long been a divisive figure, whose return to power after winning elections last October was not enthusiastically celebrated in Brussels.
Now that some members of the Government parties accuse the opposition and the non-affiliated press of having encouraged the climate that led to the attack, the Office of the President of the Republic announced yesterday that it will organize next Tuesday a meeting of leaders of all the parliamentary parties. It is an initiative of the outgoing president, Zuzana Caputová, in concert with the president-elect, Peter Pellegrini, who will succeed her in office in mid-June, to try to reduce social tensions in the country.
In this context of socio-political polarization in Slovakia, the Prime Minister’s attacker, Juraj Cintula, 71 years old, was radicalized, owner of a biography full of contradictions: poet with published work, member of writers’ societies and promoter of an anti-violence platform, but author of a bitter book against gypsies, and linked in the past to an ultra-nationalist and pro-Russian group, on whose Facebook page he claimed the existence of armed militias to defend Europeans from the arrival of “hundreds of thousands of migrants.” Investigators consider him a lone wolf who decided on his own account to attack the prime minister for political reasons.
As part of the investigations, the Slovak police yesterday searched the apartment where Cintula resides with his wife in Levice, a town an hour’s drive from Handlová, the site of the attack. The Markíza television channel showed images of the alleged shooter, dressed in a bulletproof vest and helmet, entering his home with the police. The agents searched the home for hours and took the computer and various documents.
Juraj Cintula will appear today at a hearing before the Special Criminal Court of Slovakia in Pezinok, on the outskirts of Bratislava, which must decide whether to keep him detained pending trial, as requested by the Prosecutor’s Office. Cintula is accused of “premeditated attempted murder” with political motivations, a case that has raised alarm beyond Slovakia.