Mass protests against the pro-Kremlin turn of Slovakia’s left-right cabinet of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico continued after 42-45,000 rallied in Bratislava alone on Friday, February 7.

More rallies were held in regional cities and towns, including Žilina, Poprad, Nitra, Banská Bystrica, and cities outside of Slovakia. Around 20,000 rallied in Košice, the country’s second-largest city, with a slogan “together against chaos and high costs.”

Chants of “We’ve had enough of Fico” and demands for Fico’s cabinet demise were heard across the rallies where people waved EU and Slovak flags, while the EU anthem was played in Banská Bystrica, the epicentre of Slovakia’s National Uprising against fascist and Nazi forces in 1944.  

Protest slogan “Slovakia is Europe” was accompanied by posters in held in the Bratislava rally which read “I don’t have a single reason not to be here,” or “I want boring politicians back,” mocking recent statements of government representatives, who have tried to downplay the increasing radicalisation of Fico’s populist Smer party, which relies on anti-establishment electorate and has been mobilising its supporters amid the party’s weakening popularity.

Ongoing protests against sweeping changes Fico’s cabinet introduced to the police, judiciary, and even the country's key cultural institutions over the past year intensified after Fico used the long-signalled end of the Russian gas transit through Ukraine at the end of last year to step up his pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian rhetoric.

“There is no Soros behind it [mass protests], Georgian legions or some other international conspiracy,” leader of the largest opposition party Progressive Slovakia, Michal Šimečka countered, mocking Fico’s fervent invocations of conspiracies and claims of a “coup” involving Ukrainian-linked NGO’s and Georgian units allegedly unfolding in Slovakia.

“These are free people, who, unlike you, Mr. Fico, care about the future of Slovakia. They want to live without hatred, without corruption, without senseless high costs, and with functional healthcare and firmly inside the EU,” Šimečka added.

Slovakia’s actors also mocked statements about their alleged involvement in the “coup” made by the country’s far-right Minister of Culture, Martina Šimkovičová.

“I can confirm I am [run] by British cell. I am fed information by colonel Shakespeare. In one performance, I say only what he wrote for me,” actor Robert Roth, who stars in the National Theatre performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, said in a video ridiculing Šimkovičová’s conspiracies and inviting the public to visit National Theatre plays.  

Roth’s colleague Richard Stanke added: “I am also run from abroad, this time from the other side, from Russia. Everything a certain Tolstoi wrote for me I am parroting in the play War and Peace.”

The country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Fico’s loyalist, Juraj Blanár, said during Sunday’s political programme at public broadcaster STVR that he “does not understand” why people protest across Slovakia and repeated that no one in the ruling coalition wants to take Slovakia out of the EU, nor out of NATO.

Blanár also avoided commenting on the looming cabinet reshuffle widely speculated in the Slovak media as imminent.

“Nothing is negotiated until everything is negotiated,” Blanár said in response to the legislator Roman Michelko (SNS) who told commercial television TA3 that far-right junior coalition party SNS is ready to give up the Ministry of Sport in a push to end the ongoing rows inside Fico’s coalition, which left it teetering on the verge of parliamentary majority, and avoid the prospect of early elections.  

Key posts at the country’s parliament, including the parliamentary chair, have also been left vacant since the leader of the conservative centre-left Hlas, Fico’s Smer party’s key ally, Peter Pellegrini, stepped down after being elected as the country’s president.