About 100 thousand people joined the protests in different cities of the country.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said that he will not resign from his post, as was demanded at the protests held the day before in many cities of the country. The protests are due to the pro-Russian policies of the head of government.
This was reported by Reuters.
“The government can only be changed if elections are held,” Fico said on Saturday, January 25, in an interview with the public broadcaster, answering questions about the protests.
On Friday, January 24, about 60,000 people took part in a protest in the capital Bratislava. In total, according to Slovak media, about 100,000 people joined the protests in different cities. These are the largest demonstrations since Fico's return to power in 2023.
The protests were close to the levels of 2018, when mass demonstrations forced Fico to resign as prime minister following the murder of an investigative journalist.
The current protests come after Robert Fico visited Moscow in December 2024 to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, one of the few European Union leaders to visit Moscow since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Fico administration accuses the opposition of planning to escalate the protests in an attempt to illegally overthrow the government. Opposition parties and civil society groups organizing the protests deny the accusations.
Critics of the Prime Minister say that the current government led by Robert Fico is weakening democratic values, turning foreign policy away from allies with the EU and NATO and closer to Russia.
The civil society organization “Peace to Ukraine”, which organized Friday's protests under the slogan “We are Europe”, will hold new protests on February 7.
Recall that experts in the field of psychiatry and psychology addressed an open letter to the Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico, in which they expressed concern about his emotional and psychological state, advising him to correct his political behavior or abandon it altogether politicians.
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