Milo Janáč, 49, told POLITICO that he had been returning to his home town of Gelnica (pop. 6,202) by train two weeks ago from a protest in Bratislava when a newspaper interview caught his eye. In it, teacher Eva Wolfová explained that “it’s no big thing to have 50,000 people demonstrating in Bratislava and 15,000 in Košice. But the moment they get 300 people protesting in Gelnica, it’s all over [for the Fico government].”
Gelnica, an impoverished mining town settled in the 13th century by ethnic Germans from Bavaria, lies in the Slovak Ore Mountains in the east of the country. The average gross monthly wage there in August 2024 was €1,241, the third-lowest among Slovakia’s 79 districts. Fico’s Smer won in Gelnica with 30 percent of the vote in the most recent parliamentary elections.
“I took it as a challenge, and even on the train I started messaging people to ask if they could help,” said Janáč, who in addition to writing and bartending also serves as the spokesperson for the Gelnica mayor’s office.
“Robert Fico has a lot of voter support where I live. I know he’s not going to resign, no matter how many people turn out in Gelnica, but if these protests start spreading further among these smaller towns, we’ll be in a new reality,” Janáč said.
Fico, who before 1989 belonged to the Communist Party of then-Czechoslovakia, returned to power in October 2023 for his fourth term as prime minister. Along with Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, he has formed a pro-Russian salient within the European Union, and before Christmas last year paid court to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, spurning an unofficial EU ban on meeting with top Russian officials.
‘Losing our future’
More recently Fico has claimed, without providing evidence, that legionnaires from Georgia along with Ukrainian military counterintelligence were fomenting the protests in Slovakia to overthrow his government.
