“The whole thing is crazy,” said Ivan Mikloš, head of the MESA 10 think tank and the architect of Slovakia’s economic reforms as deputy prime minister and then finance minister from 1998 to 2006.
Mikloš told POLITICO that Fico’s pro-Moscow stance and recent saber-rattling over threats to the state were disingenuous. “Global developments have played into his hand, and he has used them, but they aren’t the primary force driving his politics,” he said. “It’s just cynical pragmatism. He can’t maintain power except by mobilizing anti-system forces. And he needs to hold onto power primarily to guarantee immunity for his people.”
As for Gašpar’s remarks about keeping the door open to an EU exit, Mikloš predicted the MP had been “just testing the terrain, because the EU is and will remain an obstacle to Fico in his attempts for an authoritarian takeover of the country.”
In a Jan. 20 column for a Slovak daily, Mikloš wrote that “despite our membership in NATO and the EU, our freedom, prosperity, independence and territorial integrity are in greater peril now than [even] in the 1990s,” when Slovakia was dropped from the list of front-runners for EU and NATO membership.
“See you on Friday,” he wrote of the planned protests. “We need each other.”
