No reader of a party communique, post or publication can think that a specific politician is the cause of his personal misery. Written by Mátyás Kohán.
The twelfth (also fifth and seventh) Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic hovers between life and death. Not a wonderful, great man, not a martyr of democracy, not a hero. Rather, he is a politician who won an election in a democracy and accordingly governed a country since the end of October last year. He would rule. He will govern, perhaps.
If his assassin, a writer, security guard, liberal, neo-Nazi and racist, insane fugitive Juraj Cintula, was wrongly aimed, Deo volente.
But now - it's not like that, isn't it, according to the textbook. With death by bullet, the protein waste of political life usually leaves the stage, tyrannical monsters who brought misery, death and war, from Adolf Hitler to Nicolae Ceaușescu to Macías Nguema, who turned Equatorial Guinea into a concentration camp. Dishonorable, anti-life lives are often crowned with dishonorable death.
But if in a democracy - it doesn't matter what kind - a politician's skin meets a bullet, then someone there doesn't understand something.
And if afterwards, in a neighboring democracy - no matter what kind - the comment fields have to be boarded up because a visible number of citizens would also claim a Juraj Cintula, then I'm afraid that a lot of people don't understand a lot of things.
First of all, not what our relationship is with our leaders as citizens. Apparently, thirty-four democratic years in Slovakia and Hungary were not enough for them to be absorbed into our societies as a whole:
in a republic, the politician is neither our king who uplifts and washes away the dirt, nor our executioner who maims and destroys.
You can want to be any of them, but there is no way to be any of them. Accordingly, neither his presence nor his disappearance will be radically different. A politician can create more livable and less livable frameworks for human life, a good idea or a stupid one can pop out of his head, he can even slow down or speed up the economic development of the country.
But this is almost all insignificant smafu from the point of view of our little life.
The basic framework of our existence, the natural federal systems of our countries, the general direction of development cannot be rewritten by a politician, even if he is standing in the middle of the lake.
In a free country - and here I write "free" in the broadest possible sense, to include everything from Canada to China: in one where the state does not prevent its citizens from living as they please - we are basically the makers of our successes and failures. It is most certainly not the Prime Minister.
Z absolutism is over, so let's not absolutize the power of politicians .
So stop for a word, fellow citizen, before you shoot the prime minister.
I'll say it another way: let's not hate politicians. Not because they are all virtuous people, but because it is pointless to hate them. The subjects of Kim Jong-un or the soldiers who died in the Russo-Ukrainian war can perhaps say that their fate was shaped this way because of their leaders. However, this is certainly not true for those governed by Robert Fico, Olaf Scholz or Viktor Orbán. So it's a shame for anyone to waste on them the hatred that is already spewing back at the issuer.
What happened yesterday in Slovakia, and then in the minds of a few thousand of our compatriots, is not simply "the saddest day of Slovak democracy", as the Slovak Minister of the Interior Matúš Šutaj-Eštok declared in the hall of the hospital in Béztercebánya last night, but a bloody memento for all of us. While democracy calibrated for adult, mature citizens has already been established in our countries, some people still do not know what they are doing in it. Which is a big deal. We saw how big it is yesterday.
We, the pen-wielders, however, should know: our job is to ensure that all those who feel the need to shoot Viktor Orbán, Péter Magyar or Anna Donáth in the head should, following our daily work, do so figuratively, by blowing big ones on the ballot paper.
The demonizing practices of political communication must be done away with once and for all.
No reader of a party communique, post or publication can think that a specific politician is the cause of his personal misery. Because this is a murderous lie, the dangers of which are real. Nightmare of Nyitrabánya. And ours.
God hold Robert Fico close - and us.
Cover photo: Robert Fico, leader of the Direction - Social Democracy (Smer-SD) party
Source: MTI/EPA/Martin Divisek
