The dissident family challenging Slovakia’s Robert Fico

In November 2018 I was invited to Bratislava to attend the Central European Forum. The list of participants was impressive. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, and then only an emerging voice, was speaking. So was the extraordinary Belarusian writer and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. And also Edouard Louis, the young French literary sensation, who had just written a book about why his working-class father had turned to the far-right.

The event – organised annually since 2009 – in Bratislava and timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, was unashamedly intellectual. It had a mad chaos, where ideas were exciting. The fact that the theme was Demand the Impossible, the slogan of the 1968 Paris street protests made the occasion all the more exhilarating. The forum is the brainchild of Marta Šimečková, a small middle-aged lady in a large coat who appeared like a whirlwind in the foyer of our baroque hotel with her little rescue dog in tow. She has a talent for making everyone from the lowliest attendee to the most famous writer feel welcome and special.

There was hope in the air then in Slovakia. The Prime Minister, Robert Fico, had just stepped down after street protests triggered by the assassination of the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée.

Much has changed today. Fico is back in power – and has turned his fire on Šimečková. He has accused her of being a fraudster and “a parasite” by embezzling the public funds for her forums. She has replied in kind with a eviscerating open letter. But Fico’s intentions are clear: to close down the international discussions she is so brilliant at convening. There are other reasons for Fico’s attacks too.

Šimečková is no ordinary conference organiser. She is the daughter-in-law of the prominent Czech-Slovak dissident Milan Šimečka, whose writings Index published as samizdat during the Cold War. In an essay from 1981 intended as an introduction to George Orwell’s 1984, he writes how he feels that his story is the same as that of the anti-hero Winston and that his feelings and experience in communist Czechoslovakia mirror almost exactly those of the fictional character. A graphic biography, Comrade Dissident, has just been published in Slovak.

Šimečková’s husband is the writer and political commentator Martin, and their son Michal, is now Slovakia’s opposition leader. They are dissident royalty.

While Fico and his young hawks in government have been cosying up to Putin and pursuing pro-Russia politics, Michal Šimečka has taken the Ukrainian side, with tens of thousands joining rallies earlier this year to protest the official pro-Russian line. Fico’s government has gone further, adopting legislation which tightens the rules for nongovernmental organisations, a move critics say resembles Kremlin-style laws. Fico’s government has also attacked the independent media and rolled back LGBTQ rights, for which Michal is a champion. So the attack on Šimečková, is also an attack on Michal Šimečka, Fico’s main political opponent and an attempt to discredit the whole family.

This November Šimečková remains defiant. The Central European Forum will go ahead as usual on 16 and 17 November in Bratislava with prominent figures in Western literature and liberal political thought invited.

But for the first time since 2001, the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on 17th isn’t a public holiday. Fico, who has always claimed the date wasn’t significant and that he was retiling his bathroom at the time, abolished it this year as part of his austerity measures.