The place of an attack never afterwards resembles the place where there was an attack. The return to normality passes over him, and it is then strange and difficult to visualize the frenetic course of the violent event. The Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, was shot on Wednesday outside the House of Culture in Handlová, a town in the center of the country, and the images of his bodyguards pounced on the attacker and putting the wounded politician in a car to evacuate him gave the Around the World. The area was cordoned off.
On Saturday, three days later, the 1961 building – which also houses the municipal library – is closed until the afternoon, when the film scheduled for the May film program of this small town will be shown, where political sympathy for Fico and His populist social democratic party Smer-SSD is in the majority.
“I was here with my daughter playing an hour before the attack; “It’s very, very sad,” says Veronika, a 40-year-old mother, in the swing area of ??the central square overlooking the House of Culture. Zuzka, another 39-year-old mother with her daughter, adds: “People are affected; He is still coming to terms with what happened. People here like Robert Fico; Many here vote for Fico.” It is in small towns like this – Handlová has 17,000 inhabitants – where Fico usually has a good breeding ground for votes. In the elections last October, more than half of Handlová’s votes went to his party.
The prime minister went to Handlová – 140 kilometers from the capital, Bratislava – for a meeting of the Government, a coalition formed by his Smer-SSD together with two partners: Hlas – also officially a social democrat, but in reality centrist and liberal – and the ultranationalist SNS. The Executive holds these meetings outside Bratislava to connect with other cities in this country of 5.4 million inhabitants.
Although less than a month before the European elections – in Slovakia they vote on June 8 – every event has an electoral flavor, and even more so in this country where inflammatory rhetoric has taken over the political debate, the presence of Fico and his people in Handlová was not an official campaign event.
“The Government has met before in other cities; Here they came to ask how the city is doing, what is needed; We are a mining town, but the mine closed more than a year ago and many people have lost their jobs,” Veronika continues next to the swings. Fifteen years ago, Handlová was in the news because the biggest disaster in the history of Slovak mining occurred here: on August 10, 2009, an explosion in its coal mine killed nine miners and eleven rescuers.
At the end of the meeting, Robert Fico went to greet a group of people, among whom was the shooter, Juraj Cintula, coming from another city, Levice, who shot him at point-blank range. Everything happened very quickly, and the prime minister, bedridden but conscious in the Roosevelt Hospital in Banská Bystrica, a nearby city, remembers everything, as he conveyed to the president-elect, Peter Pellegrini, who came to visit him.
“He remembers the shooting, he was surprised that this could happen and how quickly it happened,” Pellegrini told Slovak television TA3. He was aware of everything: how he received primary care, how he was transferred by helicopter from Handlová to Banská Bystrica, how the emergency medical teams treated him and sedated him in the operating room; he was conscious until then.” Yesterday’s medical report indicated that the patient remains stable but serious.
Also yesterday, a court ordered preventive detention until trial for the man who tried to murder him, because “there is fear of a possible escape or that criminal activity will continue,” said a court spokeswoman. During a police interrogation, Cintula admitted the facts.
“People in Handlová don’t talk much about what happened; The police are monitoring Facebook in case there is someone celebrating the attack or saying that other politicians should be shot too. Maybe we all thought that something like this could happen, because of the tense atmosphere there is,” says the waitress at Club 333, a cafe right next to the House of Culture, who prefers not to give her name and who did not work on car day. . In April, the prime minister himself said on Facebook that he believed rising tensions in the country could lead to the assassination of politicians, and blamed the media for fueling division. Robert Fico referred to Slovak liberal journalists and politicians as “rats.”
In these days after the assassination attempt, several opposition and government politicians have received death threats, according to the Minister of the Interior, Matús Sutaj-Estok, of the government party Hlas, in an interview with the newspaper Pravda.
“The police are investigating about 40 people, who not only approved the attack against the prime minister, but also threatened constitutional representatives with death or violence; We are going to act harshly and ruthlessly; “If someone writes on Facebook that a politician they don’t like deserves a bullet, it’s no joke,” Sutaj-Estok said. He himself is one of those threatened, like the deputy Richard Glück, from Fico’s party, and the leader of the pro-European Progressive Slovakia (PS) party, Michal Simecka, one of the vice-presidents of the European Parliament.
On the main square of Handlová there is also a church, the Basilica of St. Catherine of Alexandria, where the youth choir rehearsed yesterday under the command of the master singer. Normality always returns, with the hope that death threats will never be a normality.
