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A mafia killing has transformed Slovakia. But for how long?

Marchers protest about the murder of Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak and his girlfriend Martina Kušnírová, 16 March 2018, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Marchers protest about the murder of Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak and his girlfriend Martina Kušnírová, 16 March 2018, Bratislava, Slovakia. Photograph: David W Cerny/Reuters

On the morning of Monday 26 February, Slovakia learned of a double murder: a young investigative journalist and his girlfriend had been shot dead. It happened in their small house, in a village not far from the Slovakian capital Bratislava. Someone called to tell me what had happened, and I thought: Oh, that’s terrible. That was it.

I’d never heard the name Ján Kuciak before. I’d never read his articles – nobody had pointed them out to me. And even if they had, I might not have been able to concentrate hard enough to follow the tangled links he described, links so complicated that they resembled chemical formulas. It was very cold that day, but in Bratislava the pictures of the smiling couple – who were the same age as my own adult children – started appearing in public places, as people lit candles and placed them by the photographs. Nothing would ever be the same again.

We simply stopped going about our normal lives. We devoured the news reports, press conferences, discussions and Facebook posts. Kuciak’s last, unfinished article, made available by his editor the next day and published by all the newspapers, was read by more people than any other article anyone can remember.

The story that Kuciak told is in fact a jumble of stories, featuring members of ’Ndrangheta – the Calabrian organised crime syndicate – mixed up with Slovaks through investments, agricultural lands benefitting from European subsidies but where nothing is grown, and bankrupt businesses. All this Kuciak connected to judges, tax authorities and politicians from the ruling party. You can read it as a police report, a sociological study, a comedy or drama. In this story there’s even a beautiful woman who enjoyed a meteoric career, rising from being a model in an ad for tractors to become a business person and then a close associate of the prime minister – a journey that led her to a Calabrian businessman as well. Yes, it reads like a soap opera too.

Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová were killed because they threatened the mafia

This is the Slovakia we now confront in disbelief. Anyone who read Kuciak’s last article could see the absurdity of a murder investigation being supervised by the very same people Kuciak pointed to in his reporting: the minister of the interior Robert Kaliňák and prime minister Robert Fico (who have since stepped down in response to public protest). The response has been a series of street protests, the largest in our country’s history.

Crowds were even bigger than those of the November 1989 velvet revolution. People gathered simultaneously throughout the country and even beyond its borders. These were by no means the first protests against corruption. But anger at someone who schemed to steal from you is one thing. Paying tribute to a murdered journalist who uncovered that scheme, and standing by his grieving family, is quite another.

Slovakia is no longer divided between the opposition and the governing coalition, the liberals and the Catholics, the left and the right. It’s divided between those who mourn Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, and the very few who don’t.

If politicians had called for rallies, they would not have achieved protests on this massive scale. Instead, the demonstrations have been organised by students. They give the podium to Kuciak’s sister, Mária. And invite activists, including gay rights defenders, and also a bishop who was thrown out of the church for having revealed financial discrepancies within its local hierarchy. People are shouting for the government to step down. The creativity of ordinary people has produced slogans that make fun of political leaders in a hundred ways, even quoting Shakespeare, among other writers.

Overnight, our pro-European prime minister became desperate enough to spew out conspiracy theories, in just the way that the far right does, but to little effect. After he blamed George Soros for fuelling the protests, people laughed, and the press laughed too. One young boy at one of the demonstrations wore a sign on the back of his coat saying: “I am too old to believe in fairytales about Soros.”

What Fico apparently forgot, when he tried to talk like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, is that Orbán has had years in which to shape his illiberal regime, and has thoroughly taken over the Hungarian media. Yet today, Slovakia is not primed for dictatorship, nor for fascism. In the 1990s we were the first country in post-communist central Europe to experience rule by a strongman – when Vladimír Mečiar governed. In the end, Mečiar’s regime was ousted by a wave of civil resistance.

It’s too soon to know the outcome of the recent protests. Romania and Bulgaria stand as examples of countries where huge anti-corruption demonstrations have failed to bring significant political change. It doesn’t help that in Slovakia there is no obvious pro-European alternative to the current government. But it’s still possible that we will manage to change the atmosphere for more than just a few weeks. I believe that our country of 5.4 million people has shown itself to be ready for democracy, thanks in large part to how young people have responded.

Czechs and Slovaks are fascinated by “magic numbers”. Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 and ceased to exist in 1938 when the Munich agreement allowed Hitler to carve it up. The communists took power with a coup in 1948. The Prague spring happened in 1968. Mečiar, whose regime was heading down the road to dictatorship, was defeated in 1998.

Ján Kuciak and his girlfriend Martina Kušnírová were killed because they threatened the mafia. After Soviet troops crushed the Prague spring in 1968, a student, Jan Palach, set fire to himself in Prague, in the name of a free Czechoslovakia.

These stories may be different, but they have something in common: their heroes were so young.

• Marta Frišová is a Slovak journalist, and co-founder of the Central European Forum in Bratislava