Slovakia’s liberal former president Andrej Kiska has been stripped of his state pension in what commentators view as a petty act of political revenge by the current populist left-right government.

Current President Peter Pellegrini’s office has stopped paying Kiska’s presidential pension in response to a court ruling over the costs of his presidential campaign when he beat the former and now current Prime Minister Robert Fico in the 2014 presidential election. A Prešov court sentenced Kiska to a conditional sentence for tax fraud related to the costs of his presidential campaign. Kiska denies any wrongdoing and will take the case to court.

“It is not about the pension, it is about principle,” Kiska wrote on his Facebook page on November 14, adding that he spent the money anyway on charity – “€300,000, the whole presidential wage, on people to whom this state cannot provide health and social care”,

“If Robert Fico and Peter Pellegrini, with a monthly wage of over €12,000, take revenge on me for beating Fico in presidential elections, then they only confirm that they are interested in nothing but scaring away everyone who touches on their comfortable life.”

Kiska beat Fico in the second-round run-off in 2014 by nearly 20 percentage points, which is seen as the largest defeat Fico has suffered during his long political career. The two then battled repeatedly during his 2014-2019 term.

Earlier, Kiska also recalled that Fico had to hand his resignation as PM in 2018 into Kiska's hands following mass protests sparked by the cold-blooded assassination of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancé.  

"These are defeats, which he [Fico] never processed inside him," Kiska said. 

In his successful presidential bid this spring, Pellegrini was backed by the populist Prime Minister Robert Fico, Kiska’s former rival, and Fico’s Smer party, which forms a ruling coalition with far-right SNS and with Pellegrini’s former party, centre-left Hlas, which splintered from Smer in 2018.  

Earlier this month, the ruling coalition pushed ahead with a resolution condemning Kiska and stating that he “disgraced the institution of the president of Slovak Republic”.

Fico himself used the Prešov court ruling to pursue his narrative about Slovakia being allegedly under threat from the West. "Andrej Kiska, similarly like [Kiska's liberal successor in the Presidential Office] Zuzana Čaputová, was an artificial product of the of anti-Slovak forces aiming to get a man to the presidential palace who would carry out the politics of the single correct mandatory view coming from the West," Fico wrote in his Facebook profile on October 31.  

“What the ruling power is doing to Andrej Kiska does not have any political sense. It is just pointless personal revenge and proof of Robert Fico’s pettiness as well as that of the whole Smer party,” commentator Martin Behul wrote at online news outlet Aktuality.sk.   

Behul recalled that although Kiska's defence in his court case was criticised by transparency NGOs, to condemn Kiska in a parliamentary resolution and "take his pension and bodyguards" prompts a question of whether Fico has "any style left in himself?"   

Since returning to power, Fico and his ruling coalition have passed a number of controversial bills, including the abolition of the Special Prosecution Office and the restructuring of public broadcaster, as well as the firings at the helm of public institutions, which have sparked country-wide protests

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Fico this May,  the ruling coalition has passed legislative amendments thaty secure life-long pensions for Fico and forbid demonstrations in the vicinity of the location where politicians live and work. The amendments also include a provision that politicians' state pensions can be scrapped in case of sentencing for criminal offences, which the governing coalition is now using against Kiska following the Prešov court ruling.  

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