How Czech-Slovak relations went south as Robert Fico turned east

Political relations between cultural cousins Czechia and Slovakia have rarely been worse — not even in 1993, when Czechoslovakia bloodlessly divorced into two independent republics.

But as Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico steers Bratislava away from the West and into Moscow’s orbit, that pivot — and the countries’ differing perspectives on the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine — has ignited a bitter animus that is estranging the former Central European compatriots.

It’s been a death by a thousand cuts, of snubs and insults that fuel more of the same. Last March, for example, Fico managed to so irk Prague that it scrapped a decades-old tradition of informal joint Cabinet meetings with its Bratislava counterpart.

The Slovak side was indignant. “We regret that Czech politicians are using Slovakia and the issues we are dealing with for their own election campaign, and this should end as soon as possible,” Katarína Roth Neveďalová, an MEP from Fico’s leftist-populist Smer party, told POLITICO.

More recently, the two leaders quarreled on social media over whether they’d had an informal chat on the margins of the Feb. 3 EU leaders summit. Fiala said they talked, but Fico wasn’t having it.

“At the informal summit in Brussels, I politely shook hands with the Czech Prime Minister P. Fiala. AND THAT’S IT!” Fico wrote in a post on Facebook.

Fiala doubled down.

“Robert Fico in Brussels must have heard very well what I was saying to him, the acoustics at the place were good. I went up to him and told him not to attack the Czech media and political scene. He reacted to that and he must remember it,” he wrote on Facebook.

Fico, for his part, has accused Czech politicians and media of meddling in Slovakia’s internal affairs in order to discredit Andrej Babiš, the Slovak-born leader of the Czech opposition party Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO).

Babiš is likely to succeed Fiala as Czech prime minister in a fall parliamentary election.

“I can find dozens of interventions by Czech politicians in Slovakia’s internal politics, and just as many attacks on the prime minister of the Slovak Republic, which are spreading through Czech media like cancer,” Fico told reporters. “You are creating the image of ‘watch out, Andrej Babiš will be the same as Robert Fico.'”

Cue the outrage in Prague.

Robert Fico has accused Czech politicians and media of meddling in Slovakia’s internal affairs in order to discredit Andrej Babiš, the Slovak-born leader of the Czech opposition party Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO). | Gabriel Kuchta/Getty Images

“Robert Fico’s accusation that the Czech Republic is interfering in Slovakia’s affairs is absurd. Unless the Slovak prime minister is referring to how Andrej Babiš supported him before the last Slovak elections,” Fiala wrote in a post on X, accompanied by a smiley face that can only have been intended to provoke.

But underneath all the squabbling, the sense of real national drift has been difficult to ignore.

Earlier this month, Fiala ruled out renewing the joint Cabinet meetings, saying they would be “inappropriate” in light of “Slovakia’s foreign policy activities.”

“If someone criticizes Brussels more often than Moscow, I am certainly right to say that this is not in our interest, this is not the right policy,” Fiala said on Czech TV.

From east to south

So how did these two nations, which share so much culture, language and history, end up barely on speaking terms?

The simple answer is that the more Slovakia has turned east under Fico, the further mutual relations have gone south.

The Czech Republic remains one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters in its war with Russia, having welcomed 385,000 Ukrainian refugees (third most in the EU) and fronted an initiative to procure ammunition for Kyiv.

That record contrasts starkly with Slovakia, where since his 2023 election to a fourth term Fico has repeated Moscow talking points and recently visited President Vladimir Putin in an unsuccessful bid to secure cheap Russian gas after Kyiv refused further transit of the fuel.

Fico has also aimed repeated jabs at Ukraine, claiming “there is no war in Kyiv” and threatening to halt cross-border electricity exports and slash aid to Ukrainian refugees in Slovakia.

Political scientist Petr Kaniok said current relations between the two countries should be seen in their historical context.

“Fico’s government is essentially a reflection of certain moods that have always existed in Slovakia,” he told POLITICO in an interview. “We know from history that the Slovak population has always been more pro-Russian, more suspicious of the West than the Czech population.”

“Fico’s government is essentially a reflection of certain moods that have always existed in Slovakia,” political scientist Petr Kaniok told POLITICO. | Zuzana Gogova/Getty Images

According to the Globsec Trends 2024 survey, only 41 percent of Slovaks blame Russia for starting the war in Ukraine, compared with 68 percent of Czechs.

Kaniok described the attitude of Fico’s government as “typical populism, in which you find an external enemy and blame them for everything.”

Potential for a reset?

Given their relative youth, the democracies of Central and Eastern Europe remain fluid, even in their basic orientation. Frenemies, who rarely remain at odds for long.

Babiš, an ethnic Slovak whose ANO party has led the polls in Czechia for months, has vowed to renew the informal meetings with Slovakia if he takes office this fall.

Fico and Babiš — both former members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia — have always had friendly relations. Babiš supported both Fico and his political ally, Slovak President Peter Pellegrini, ahead of their election to office in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

With Babiš on track to win the country’s fall ballot, Czechia could soon be joining Slovakia on its eastward trajectory, Fiala fears — adding another country to the nascent pro-Kremlin bloc in Central Europe that already comprises Slovakia, Hungary and potentially Austria.

That four-member bloc is likely to have more influence at the EU level than if the countries acted alone, and echoes the Visegrad Group alliance, which Babiš has said he wants to revive.

Launched in 1991 among then-Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary to further regional cooperation and later to strengthen its members’ voices within the EU, Visegrad has largely been forgotten amid the current deep political divides among its members.

“The Visegrad Group worked best when the prime ministers got along personally,” Kaniok said. “This was the case when Babiš was leading the Czech government, when Robert Fico was in Slovakia, when [current PM] Viktor Orbán was in Hungary, and when [former PM Mateusz] Morawiecki was in Poland.”

If Babiš returns to power, Kaniok added, these countries, Poland excepted, could pick up again where they left off — with ominous implications for European unity.

POLITICO reached out to the Czech and Slovak government offices but did not immediately receive a comment.