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 and most extreme chapter in a wave of attacks on politicians in the West that 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 Morning Express. “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 hate speech 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 2004), 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.
A phenomenon, points out Vassilis Ntousas, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund, also motivated by “malicious actors who do not necessarily seek to create divisions but to widen them, encourage them to create more polarization” that could have started long before the pandemic. The expert remembers the campaigns that already tried to influence and misinform the 2016 US elections, of which Russia was accused.
The imminence of the European elections in a highly charged electoral year is exacerbating the situation. “Elections are generally a turning point, passions increase. And there is a genuine fear, not specific to a country, but at the European level, that the polarization of politics is leading to violence,” Ntousas stated by telephone.
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; or that of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. None were members of the European 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 murder of Djindjic in 2003 – seemed, rather, a thing of the past.
Troubled moment
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. The last major wave spanned from the 1960s, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and, in Europe, an attempt to kill French General Charles de Gaulle, until the mid-1980s, with the assassination of 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.
The temperature of public life is, sometimes, “too high,” Ntousas notes. An excessive heating of public opinion hit by a confluence of phenomena, especially through platforms and social networks that act as an “echo chamber that serves as a basis for the confirmation of one’s prejudices” and increases the absolute certainty of the individuals on certain topics, hindering the debate that is key to the functioning of democratic societies. All of this in an era in which, furthermore, there is a change, not exactly positive, regarding “what is permissible to say and do in politics.”
Polarization, Ntousas emphasizes, is a “symmetrical” phenomenon across the political spectrum, both on the left and on the right, although, he points out, at this historical moment (not in others), “violence is more likely to come.” from the right.” “But once the genie is taken out of the bottle, all political forces can be victims of it. That is why everyone should be more careful,” warns the German Marshall Fund researcher.
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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