Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico shot “several times”: live updates

Mr Fico, who had been a member of the Communist Party during its government, founded the Smer party in the late 1990s and began the first of his three terms as prime minister in 2006. Slovakia is a landlocked country with around five million inhabitants.

The Smer party, which was originally on the political left but has increasingly embraced right-wing views on immigration and cultural issues, has always governed as part of a coalition. Much of the international attention on Mr. Fico’s leadership in recent years has focused on his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Slovakia’s southern neighbor.

Mr Fico resigned as prime minister in July 2018 after mass demonstrations over the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova, which exposed corruption in the government. The protests that rocked the country were the largest since the Velvet Revolution; Demonstrators called for the government to resign and new elections.

Slovakia ranks first in independent assessments of press freedom, but protesters had also sought deeper changes in the country that Mr. Fico oversaw.

He returned to power in an election last fall and formed a coalition government after securing around 23 percent of the vote after fighting sanctions against Russia imposed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 The country’s ammunition should be sent to Ukraine, he had told voters.

That stance, in a country where pro-Russian sentiment has played a significant role in the past, worried EU leaders in Brussels, who said they feared Slovakia would form a pro-Russian alliance with Mr. Orban and possibly Italy Head of State Georgia Meloni could make a move that would hamper support for Ukraine in the European Union. At the time, it was also seen as a sign of the obvious erosion of the pro-Ukrainian bloc that Europe had formed after the invasion.

In April, an ally of Mr. Fico, Peter Pellegrini, won election as Slovakia’s president. The position is largely ceremonial in nature, but analysts said the victory strengthened the influence of pro-Russia political forces in Central Europe as Mr. Pellegrini opposed providing military and financial aid to Ukraine.