Media Capture: The Slovak Government Follows Hungarian Recipe For Power ⋆ Visegrad Insight

Whoever controls a country's media controls the country itself

23 July 2024

Marcin Król Fellow

Robert Fico and his Smer-led government have already taken control of Slovakia’s public television. Now, they are targeting private media and NGOs.

Robert Fico is considered the most successful Slovak politician of recent times. He has won parliamentary elections five times and served as prime minister on four of those occasions. Remarkably, he achieved these victories without mainstream media support, gaining media backing only before the 2023 elections from alternative disinformation websites that favour nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric and are filled with radical anti-Western claims.

Fico knows he can get to power without standard media support, but he wants more: a constitutional majority and revenge. This is why his government now aims to control and neutralise the Slovak media scene and civil sector.

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Eva Mihočková

Marcin Król Fellow

Marcin Król Fellow 2024 at Visegrad Insight. She is an Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy SFPA, a media website operated by the Slovak Foreign Policy Association. She is also a member of Team Europe Direct and works as an investigative journalist for Stop the Corruption Foundation. Last year she was awarded the Journalism Award 2022 by the Open Society Foundation in Slovakia. Eva started her journalistic career in 1998 at Slovak Television. Since then, she has worked for major news outlets such as TA3 television, RTVS public broadcaster, Euractiv.sk, Plus7dní weekly, and Trend weekly, where she served as a reporter, moderator, and a member of the editorial office management team.