5 Years After Kuciak Murder, Slovak Journalists Are Still Being Attacked by Politicians

The ruthless double murder of two innocent people on February 21, 2018, triggered the largest wave of anti-government protests in Slovakia's modern history.

The then-prime minister Robert Fico - who at the time disparaged the organisers of the protests as "Soros's children", accused them of an illegal coup, and even showily offered 1 million euros to anyone who could help solve the crime - was forced to step down three weeks after the killings to avoid early elections. Another member of Fico's Smer party, Peter Pellegrini, was appointed the new prime minister, an unsatisfying change to many.

Still, the already launched international investigation of the case, confirming the soundness of Kuciak's journalistic stories on economic crimes linked to people around Smer along the way, began to unearth how the state under three Smer-led governments had gradually fallen under the sway of oligarchs and organised crime.

Two years later, pledges and slogans to root out corruption and organised crime secured the populist movement Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO), led by Igor Matovič, a landslide victory in the March 2020 parliamentary elections. The movement formed a coalition government, and Smer ended up in opposition.

The same year, the country saw three men convicted of involvement in Kuciak and Kušnírová's murders. Yet in September, the Specialised Criminal Court acquitted the alleged masterminds of the double murder, businessman Marian Kočner, a main character in some of Kuciak's stories, and his alleged conspirator Alena Zsuzsová on all accounts for a lack of evidence. But the pair, who are today serving long prison sentences for other economic and murder crimes, have been back in the dock in a retrial since last February...