Robert Fico

In other news, Donald Tusk, leader of Poland's main opposition Civic Platform party, is put under investigation by Warsaw prosecutors for abuse of power; the new Czech president is already at odds with the government; and former Slovak PM Robert Fico says 'yes' to Ukraine in the EU, 'no' to it joining NATO.

"Giving up is not a solution. It's what the mafia wants," Heger wrote on social media soon after, employing a term that Matovič's OĽaNO often uses to refer to previous governments led by Robert Fico's Smer party.

The ruthless double murder of two innocent people on February 21, 2018, triggered the largest wave of anti-government protests in Slovakia's modern history.

A referendum will take place in Slovakia on Saturday, as citizens vote on a constitutional change that would make it possible to shorten parliament's term through a referendum or by a majority vote in the parliament. The referendum, the first in seven years, was initiated by the opposition Smer party back in 2021.

Nurturing 'pub talk'

The popularity of Robert Fico, the former prime minister and chair of the social democratic Smer party who is currently an opposition MP, has received a boost lately. While only 19 per cent of voters trusted him in November 2020, that figure had risen to 29 per cent by September, according to a poll by Focus.

Things had all seemed so different a year ago.

No government in Slovak history has faced challenges like those confronting the new administration led by Matovic and his anti-establishment OLANO party. Along with the deadly virus, it has the contagion of decades of corruption to content with.

In the first parliamentary election since the murder two years ago of journalist Jan Kuciak, the Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OLANO) party took almost 25 per cent of the vote, compared with 18.5 per cent for SMER-SD.

It was SMER-SD's first loss in a general election since 2006 and its worst showing at the ballot box since 2002.

Call it the "subsidy paradox": EU cash meant to encourage development ends up misused by populist governments whose very existence undermines the bloc's cherished values. Worse, it gives them stamina and strength.

The report, Fighting Words: Journalism Under Assault in Central and Eastern Europe, issued on Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford evaluates the situation of the media in the region by drawing on interviews with about a hundred journalists in 16 countries during 2019.