European liberals erupted into cheers in 2019 when the 45-year-old environmentalist and civil rights lawyer Zuzana Caputova was sworn in as Slovakia’s president. Even though she has fallen short of her ambitious goal of rooting out the persistent corruption and cronyism that course through Slovak society, she has chalked up many successes. These have earned her widespread popularity among Slovaks, who seemed to understand her project would always require more than one five-year term.
European liberals erupted into cheers in 2019 when the 45-year-old environmentalist and civil rights lawyer Zuzana Caputova was sworn in as Slovakia’s president. Even though she has fallen short of her ambitious goal of rooting out the persistent corruption and cronyism that course through Slovak society, she has chalked up many successes. These have earned her widespread popularity among Slovaks, who seemed to understand her project would always require more than one five-year term.
There’s just one problem: Caputova, facing new headwinds from the election of a new populist prime minister, has announced she’s not prepared to fight on.
Not only was Caputova the first-ever woman to hold the office, but her progressive, pro-European outlook and squeaky-clean biography stood out in a regional landscape stocked with ethnic nationalists, authoritarians, and other questionable operators. Caputova’s tough anticorruption platform was welcome relief to a country that had been rocked by graft, money laundering, and abuse of power scandals, as well as the contracted murder of a young journalist investigating organized crime.
In the course of her five-year term, the newcomer to elected office acquitted herself remarkably well, navigating Slovakia through the pandemic and then the war in Ukraine, a country with which it shares 60 miles of border to the east. Even as Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, prevaricated and obstructed transatlantic solidarity with Ukraine—a course many Slovak nationalists applauded—Caputova, suddenly head of a front-line state, stood fast. She has remained unflinchingly pro-Western even in the face of an acute energy crisis and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Her mission to clean up the Slovakian state also notched impressive wins. Dozens of investigations were launched and cases opened up against figures linked to former governments—many of which led to convictions. In August 2023, Caputova—sometimes referred to as the Erin Brockovich of Slovakia—fired the country’s counterintelligence service chief for interfering in corruption investigations. But her anticorruption drive grew larger in scope when parliamentary elections in September 2023 reinstated Robert Fico, the former prime minister and pro-Russian, anti-American populist with the interests of himself and his associates always foremost in mind.
Many supporters expected that Caputova, as the principled, popular face of a new Slovakia, would soldier on for at least another term come elections in March 2024: to finish the job she had started. But Caputova’s tenure, she announced in June 2023, will come abruptly to an end. Her family’s well-being, she said, was behind her choice not to run again. “My decision is a personal one,” she said. “I am sorry if I disappoint those who expected my candidacy again.” In office, she had received multiple death threats, she said. A year earlier, she had already complained about “people who are threatening to kill me are using the vocabulary of some politicians. It does not only concern me, but also my loved ones.”
At the time of her announcement, Caputova polled as Slovakia’s most trusted politician. “I was surprised and disappointed when I heard the news,” said Pavol Demes of a German Marshall Fund fellow in Bratislava, who served as Slovakia’s foreign minister from 1991 to 1992. “Her track record proves that it was not coincidence that people elected her,” Demes said, adding that he believes Caputova would have prevailed again at the ballot box.
Others admit they’re more than just disappointed with Caputova’s “premature departure,” as the Slovak daily Dennik N put it. “Having an opportunity and not using it is literally a sin,” opined the Slovak newspaper Pravda, “especially if it is one that will never come again. … President Zuzana Caputova’s decision not to run can be considered a mistake. At a time when the chaos in Slovak politics has reached unprecedented proportions and the disillusionment among the population is great, the president bears even more responsibility for the fate of the country.”
In office, Caputova often punched back as hard as she was punched by her less principled opponents. She refused to let Fico, in the opposition since 2020, hound and bully her with impunity. In May 2023, she sued Fico for calling her an “American agent” and of “appointing Soros’ government,” referring to U.S. billionaire-philanthropist George Soros and the technocratic caretaker government she appointed in May 2023. Slovak authorities are still pursuing criminal cases involving dangerous threats made against the president.
Caputova’s aversion to the nastier aspects of Central European politics—in 1995 the son of the then-Slovak president was literally kidnapped—is understandable. But Caputova’s presence is all the more necessary today as Fico and his Smer-SD party are back in power and bent on returning Slovakia to its former incarnation. In just four months, Caputova has checked Fico several times. In October, for example, Caputova quashed the nomination of Rudolf Huliak as environment minister by the Slovak National Party, a Fico ally. Huliak, a nationalist, is known as a climate skeptic and opponent of LGBTQ+ rights.
She is currently weighing a veto of the Fico government’s move to dismantle the special prosecutor’s office—the body that handled the most serious corruption cases—and modify the criminal code, which triggered weeks of protests across Slovakia and rule-of-law concern from the EU. By weakening criminal sanctions for financial crimes, Fico could rescue the likes of Smer-allied oligarchs who would otherwise face prison sentences. One opposition politico charged that the law looks as if the mafia itself had written it. If her veto is overridden, which is likely, Caputova could take the issue to the Constitutional Court.
Caputova’s decision not to run thus opens the way for a multi-candidate race, the first round of which will be held on March 23 with, if necessary, a second in April. The vote is likely to come down to two candidates: National Council Speaker Peter Pellegrini, an on-again, off-again Fico ally; and Ivan Korcok, a liberal-minded former Slovak foreign minister and career diplomat. If Pellegrini triumphs, his victory will open the way for Fico to set in motion a pro-Russia political course that will greatly complicate the West’s defense of Ukraine, among other concerns.
Certainly, there would be no presidential corrective to hinder Fico in emulating his strongman counterpart next door in Hungary, Viktor Orban. Poland’s throwing off of its authoritarian leadership last year could have left Orban completely isolated in Central Europe. But Fico, though unlikely to amass the power of Orban’s Fidesz party or act so defiantly as Law and Justice Poland, sees Orban as a blood brother.
“Fico and his followers are fascinated by Orban’s method of governance since 2018,” Juraj Marusiak of the Slovak Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Political Science told Foreign Policy. “They see this authoritarianism as efficient and Orban as someone who takes care of his country’s national interests. This has made Orban creditable in Central Europe beyond Hungary alone.”
And Caputova’s bright light will be missed beyond diminutive Slovakia. Upon her election in 2019, a Hungarian acquaintance said to me that the only reason someone like Caputova could win in Central Europe is because she seemed to have no drawbacks at all: She was politically clean, charismatic, down to earth, and smart. And in office, she learned the ropes quickly. But she wasn’t perfect, apparently—no one could foresee that there would eventually be limits to her will to lock horns with Slovakia’s ruthless profiteers.
Sadly, there’s only one of her in the region. And soon, by her own choice, there will be none.
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