Dmitri A. Medvedev, former Russian president and regular forecaster of World War III, has no hesitation in identifying the would-be assassin of Slovak Prime Minister Roberto Fico as the young man who sparked World War I. I compared it without any problems. He was on the brink again.
Medvedev said on the social network Mr. Princip was a 19-year-old Bosnian. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 by Serbian nationalists sparked what Churchill called “the most difficult and cruelest” of all wars.
It was a wild association on many levels. The imperial Europe that collapsed between 1914 and 1918 is long gone, as is the Europe that produced Auschwitz in its place. Instead, a European Union of 27 countries, including Slovakia, was painstakingly constructed, with the overriding goal of making war impossible on the long-ravaged continent.
But with just three weeks until the European Parliament elections, the shooting of Fico, who remains in a serious condition, is not the only ominous sign of violence.
A 27-month-old war has raged in Ukraine, which is outside the EU but within a stone's throw of the bloc. As with World War I, as Tim Butcher put it in his book, conflicts involving soldiers increasingly become “the drain of bullets and barrages, the shared suffering and fear of disease and deprivation, the same morass of murder.'' They have been reduced to “bait trapped inside.” The book “The Trigger'' depicts Princip's life.
In important respects, Russia is waging war against European liberal democracies in Ukraine. The question raised by the attempt on Mr. Fico's life is how far Europeans are willing to go to war against their own country, given the extreme political polarization that prevails in society.
Although the motive behind the shooting remains unclear, the assassination attempt occurred in a toxic political environment that is likely to be even more toxic, at least in Slovakia, and potentially elsewhere.
Europe is increasingly divided and dangerously so. As in Slovakia, that division pits nationalists who oppose immigration against liberals who see the far right as a threat to the rule of law, freedom of the press, and democracy itself. In this world of politics, there are no longer adversaries, only enemies. As recent events have shown, it is good to attack them by any means possible, including violence.
Amid all the political sparks flying, a single spark could ignite an explosion. Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist who specializes in Central Europe, said Fico's assassination attempt “shows what this kind of polarization can lead to, and it's something that European society and the United States need to reflect on.” Stated.
Wars outside Europe and political struggles within Europe fuel each other. Russia's advance on the battlefield, the apparent Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea, and the possibility of NATO sending trainers to Ukraine are reminders that escalation is always possible. Fico's shooting incident proved that.
Fico opposes the power of the European Union, military aid to Ukraine, mass immigration, and LGBTQ rights. He is disliked by liberals for a variety of reasons. He is not popular in Slovakia's capital Bratislava, but he is popular in the suburbs. In this respect, his political fortunes coincide with rifts in societies including France, Germany and the Netherlands, where the center of conflict is now nation versus world.
It sees immigrants as a threat to their livelihoods, pitting forgotten people “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas against wealthy, connected global citizens living “somewhere” in the knowledge economy. .
The war in Ukraine has sharpened these rifts further, as nationalists across Europe align themselves with President Vladimir V. Putin's reactionary moral ideology. They work with him and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to portray Western liberal urban elites as stooges bent on destroying church, state, family, and traditional notions of marriage and gender.
Mr Medvedev described the would-be Slovak assassin, who was not identified except as a 71-year-old pensioner, as a representative of the “Europe of disgusting degenerates who do not know their own history”, which Mr Fico was fighting against. called. .
His shooting appears to reflect the shrinking middle ground in Europe's political conflicts. Polish intellectual historian Karolina Wigla said, “What you do or say can lead to psychological, verbal or physical attacks.'' She says, “Our society has become intolerable to accepting that someone else sees or defines something in a completely different way.”
On Thursday, liberal Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who returned to power late last year after defeating the ruling nationalist Law and Justice Party, posted on X a threat from the previous day. “Today, Slovaks gave us an example of what we should do.” He will work with Donald Tusk if he sacks the CPK. ”
This was a reference to a major airport project supported by Law and Justice, but questioned by the new government.
When Tusk took office in December, Jarosław Kaczynski, chairman of the Law and Justice Commission and Poland's de facto leader since 2015, called him a “German agent.” Such charges, which are effectively treason, are common across Europe. The air is full of “Jewish agents” and “Russian agents.” During the campaign for the current European Parliament elections, Mr. Tusk and Mr. Kaczynski have exchanged accusations that they are “Russian spies.”
Slovakia's Interior Minister Matus Stagi Estok warned this week that “we are on the threshold of civil war.”
Political violence is not limited to Slovakia. In Germany, Matthias Ecke, a prominent Social Democratic Party politician, was assaulted by four people this month while holding up election posters in Dresden, resulting in a fractured cheekbone and eye socket and serious injuries that required emergency surgery. Mr Ecke is running for re-election as a member of the European Parliament.
Rapid technology-driven change, the pervasiveness of social media where all accusations are made, and the erosion of agreed notions of truth all contribute to civility succumbing to brutality.
“There is a widespread sense of loss,” Wigla said. “Being different is a threat.”
But the main factor in the trend towards violent conflict is likely to be the surge in immigration – some 5.1 million migrants entered the European Union in 2022, more than double the previous year – and the Opinions were largely divided.
“The European Union appears unable to protect its own borders,” Rupnik said. “So countries started saying, okay, we have to do it ourselves.”
It also led to the rapid rise of xenophobic, far-right parties in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia themselves with patriotic odes to national glory. They often have roots in fascism, though without militarism or cults of personality, at least for now. The barriers that once kept these parties (such as Alternative for Germany and France's National Rally) from power have eroded or collapsed.
These parties are expected to perform well in the June 9 European Parliament elections. Although the European Parliament is a relatively powerless institution, it remains an important institution in that it is the only directly elected body comprised of representatives from all European Union countries. In France, polls show Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party winning about twice as many votes as President Emmanuel Macron's centrist Renaissance party.
Before Fico's assassination attempt, the climate was flammable. Even more so now. The realm of possibilities has expanded even further. Postwar Europe had a culture of peace, but it was already shaken by the Ukraine war. Leaders are not used to being targeted in this way. Almost 40 years have passed since Sweden's Social Democratic Party Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated in Stockholm in 1986.
“I don't know about World War III,” Wigla said. There are fewer and fewer opportunities to voice your opinions. The situation is much more dangerous than before. ”
The peaceful normality of post-war Europe seemed unshakable, and the painful lessons of history were being learned. However, as Russia's revivalist war in Ukraine proved, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was not ultimately bloodless. It seems that the evil ghost of Europe has begun to stir.