Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico on Sunday drew a comparison between the attack on former US President Donald Trump and his own shooting in May. Trump was hit in the ear during a campaign rally in an assassination attempt on Saturday. Fico, 59, was hit by four bullets from close range after a government meeting in central Slovakia on May 15. He underwent two lengthy surgeries in a nearby hospital and returned to work last week.
‘The scenario is like a photocopy,’ Fico said on his website. The nationalist-leaning Fico accused the liberal Slovak opposition of inciting hatred against him. ‘If Donald Trump’s attacker spoke Slovak, he would have only had to read the (local) newspapers Dennik N, Sme or Aktuality to want to ‘set things right’,’ Fico said on Sunday. ‘Trump’s political opponents are trying to silence him and when they don’t succeed, they annoy the public so much that some poor guy grabs a gun.’
Fico leads a three-party coalition of his centrist Smer-SD party, the centrist Hlas party, and the far-right SNS party in governing the EU and NATO member state of 5.4 million people. He has also called on Slovakia to build a wall to stop ‘progressive and liberal ideologies’, comparing them to a cancer.
