Pro-Putin and anti-Islam firebrand Voting in Slovakia is won by Robert Fico’s party

With practically all ballots in the central European nation of Slovakia tabulated, the anti-Islam, pro-Russia SMER-SSD Party of former prime minister Robert Fico has won the legislative election.

The left-wing populist SMER-SSD and the centrist Progressive Slovensko (PS) were predicted to face combat in a close election. SMER-SSD was ahead of PS with 23% of the vote after 99.2% of the voting places had been tallied.

It is now very possible that the 59-year-old former Czechoslovak Communist Party member will be elected prime minister of Slovakia a third time.

The left-wing populist known for his pro-Putin allegiances, Fico, has received a lot of attention in the media for his opposition to European backing for Ukraine and sanctions on Russia.

The victory of Fico’s party by such a wide majority, however, is viewed by many as providing another boost to Europe’s rising anti-immigration and Islamophobic political climate. The Muslim community in Slovakia might be especially worried about it.

During his last term as prime minister, Fico developed a reputation for using harsh anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric and for disobeying EU immigration rules.

According to Fico, “Islam has no place in Slovakia” and “the problem is that [Muslims] want to change the face of the country,” respectively, during the so-called migration crisis in Europe in 2016.

In the same year, Fico publicly attributed the 2016 IS attacks in Paris and racist conspiracies about Syrian refugees abducting German women to Muslim immigration to Europe and, more broadly, to the presence of Islam in European countries, with him and his party endorsing the ‘Islamisation’ conspiracy theory.

He added that his government was “monitoring every Muslim in our territory”.

Fico claimed that “thousands of terrorists and Islamic State fighters are entering Europe with migrants” during his previous campaign for prime minister, with a banner reading “Charinme Slovensko” (“We’re protecting Slovakia”) behind him.

We will never introduce a single Muslim to Slovakia, I can assure you of that, he said.

In this regard, Fico honoured his word, disregarding the EU’s quota system and bringing in only 180 Christian Syrian migrants.

More concerningly, while Fico was previously in office, he signed legislation that was put up by his far-right coalition partners in the Slovak National Party (SNS), preventing Islam from receiving official state recognition.

The legislation granted state privileges to religious groups with at least 50,000 members; Slovakia has barely 5,000 Muslims.

Because of this, Slovakia is the only EU member nation without a mosque.

At the time, Andrej Danko, a member of the coalition with Fico, said: “Islamization starts with a kebab and it’s already under way in Bratislava. Let’s realise what we will face in five to ten years.”

Fico’s earlier SMER-SSD governments have used Romani and LGBT people as scapegoats, making them another minority group they have attacked. He has also been charged with approving the intimidation of scathing journalists.