It's July 2025. Robert Fico is on the attack. The head of Smer convenes a press conference in the company of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Juraj Blanar and the deputy speaker of parliament Tibor Gaspar announces that a “foreign power” tried to influence the 2023 parliamentary elections to the detriment of his party.
He was pointing at London.
Soon the words turned into actions. Blanar summoned the British ambassador, and the police took up the matter. The coalition even changed the penal code.
After eight months of investigation, it became clear that there was no interference in the Slovak elections. Investigators threw the case into the trash bin.
According to Fico, Britain allegedly influenced Slovak elections by paying influencers, activists and journalists to shape public opinion to Smer's disadvantage. and in favor of Progressive Slovakia — the party that posed the biggest threat to Fico three years ago. The Prime Minister wanted to find out “who these journalists were, how much money they received, what they wrote, what contract they signed.”
The police took the matter extremely seriously. She proactively announced that she would investigate everything, also in cooperation with the intelligence services. The case was handled by the Service for Combating Organized Crime (ÚBOK), an elite police unit dealing with combating the most serious crimes and terrorism.
Ultimately, the police did not establish anything and found no grounds to initiate criminal proceedings. — The Bratislava District Prosecutor's Office supervised a criminal case investigating suspicions of interference in the elections to the National Parliament of the Slovak Republic in 2023 and to the European Parliament in 2024 by members of the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and non-governmental organizations. On March 30, 2026, the ÚBOK investigator decided to discontinue the case -aktuality.sk Gabriela Kovacova from the District Prosecutor's Office in Bratislava.
How the Prime Minister was misleading
The entire scandal that Fico caused was based on an article by the British website Declassified UK, which discovered that the British Foreign Office, through Zinc Network, paid influencers in Europe to mobilize young voters in regions of Central and Eastern Europe that are heavily affected by Russian propaganda.
However, the article did not mention activists or journalists – it was the Slovak Prime Minister who suggested it to the public. Fico's statement that influencers helped progressives also did not fit. This was also denied by the author of the mentioned article, Martin Williams.
— My investigation revealed that social media influencers were paid to post videos aimed at mobilizing young voters ahead of the 2023 elections. This was not an explicitly partisan campaign or an endorsement of a specific political party, he said in an interview with Dennik N. He also denied that Slovak journalists took part in the action.
The British Embassy in Slovakia also firmly defended itself against the accusations. “Any claim that the UK attempted to influence the outcome of the election or encourage voting for or against a particular political party is completely untrue,” she responded last summer.
Moreover, only Progressive Slovakia did not benefit from the mobilization of first-time voters, as some coalition representatives suggested. Progressives reached as much as 32 percent. of them, but the second most popular entity among first-time voters was Smer with 17%. Third place was taken by Hlas with a score of 10%. This was shown by the exit poll results of the Focus agency.
Election calculator
For example, the Slovak non-governmental organization Memo 98 received financial resources from the Zinc agency. It was approximately PLN 63,000. euro (approx. PLN 270 thousand), which was allocated to the promotion of the election calculator on the Infovoľby website.
It is a tool that can help voters understand the programs of political parties so that they can decide who to ultimately vote for. This is not about support for any particular political party. For convinced voters of Smer or Republika, the calculator is unlikely to indicate that PS is closest to their views.
— Everyone can check that this tool is not used to promote one party. For example, if you answer all the questions with “yes” and then all with “no”, a completely different political party from a different political spectrum will be displayed, explained Rastislav Kuzel from Memo 98 in an interview for Aktuality.sk.
Moreover, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself supported the “I want to stay here” mobilization campaign with the amount of PLN 35,000. euro (approx. PLN 150,000). Its faces were: current MEP from Progressive Slovakia, then presenter and influencer Veronika Cifrová Ostrihoňová, hockey player Michal Handzuš and former Prime Minister Iveta Radičová. Several non-governmental organizations were behind the initiative, such as the Open Society Foundation, Memo 98 and the Stop Corruption Foundation.
