There Radio and Television of Slovakia, Rtvs, will be closed soon; in its place will come one new public institution «less critical and more compliant with current Slovak politics», the Slovak Television and Radio (Stvr). This was decided yesterday, with 78 votes in favor out of 150 seats, by the Bratislava Parliament, led by Prime Minister Robert Fico who is recovering from the consequences of the attack suffered on May 15th. The opposition did not participate in the vote in protest, commenting that the government is leading the country following “an autocrats’ manual”. And the move of close public television to re-establish it it seems like a step towards total control of the media by the sovereignist and eurosceptic prime minister, with the approval of the new head of state.
The former president Zuzana Čaputová, belonging to the forces that are now in the opposition, concluded his mandate on Saturday; his successor, Petr Pellegrini, is a close ally of Robert Fico.
Fico, in the speech in which he announced that he would return to work, had defined his attacker as “a messenger of the opposition”: “I have no reason”, he said, “to define him as a lone wolf”. And the cancellation of public television, he said, is necessary because Slovak Radio and Television as it is now has “prejudices and is in conflict with the government”. For days it has been demonstrating in Bratislava, in marches organized by the opposition party Progressive Slovakia, but the director general Lubos Machaj, a playwright and intellectual of national importance, will have to resign in the meantime.
Here is the plan for the “new” public television, drawn up by the Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová, from the Slovak National Party (the same party as Fico and Pellegrini). The new Slovak television and radio station, Stvr, will have a director selected by a board whose nine members will be appointed by the Ministry of Culture and Parliament.
