Slovakia begins the final two days of voting in its EU-wide elections on Saturday in the shadow of last month’s shooting of Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Late on Friday, another violent incident occurred in a Copenhagen square when a man punched Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
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The motive for the assault on Frederiksen was not immediately clear, and police arrested a man but immediately released few details about what happened.
The attempted assassination of Slovakia’s populist prime minister, Fico, by a 71-year-old poet on May 15 shocked the country of 5.4 million people and sent shock waves across the European Union.
Hours after voting begins in Slovakia, attention will turn to Italy as polling stations open, where far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hopes his party’s strong showing will strengthen its position as a key EU power.
Most of the EU’s 27 member states, including the biggest economies Germany and France as well as Denmark, will vote in supranational European Parliament elections on Sunday.
Since last month’s attack on Mr Fico, his left-wing populist party, the Smer Social Democrats, has surged to the top of opinion polls ahead of Slovakia’s elections, surging ahead of its main liberal rivals.
On Wednesday, hours before the country went into a pre-election media ban, a visibly thinner Fico released a video message describing his attackers as “activists of the Slovak opposition.”
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“This opposition party failed to appreciate where its aggressive and hateful politics had led parts of society and it was only a matter of time before tragedy occurred,” the four-time prime minister said in the 14-minute video.
Smer used the attack in his election campaign under the slogan “For Robert Fico, for Slovakia.”
The party opposes EU arms supplies to Ukraine, calls itself a “party of peace” and lashes out at alleged “warmongers” in Brussels.
It remains to be seen whether the surge in public opinion since Fico’s shooting will translate into higher voter turnout: in the last EU elections in 2019, just 22% of Slovaks voted.
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While the dramatic backdrop surrounding the Slovak vote has generated increased interest, the Italian vote, which begins on the same day, is likely to have a much more significant impact in determining the future direction of the EU.
Opinion polls suggest that Meloni’s Brotherhood of Italy party is on track to win 27% of the vote and 22 seats, amid a surge in far-right support across the EU.
That could make her a kingmaker — or, more accurately, a queenmaker — as her support could prove crucial in determining whether the current conservative European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, is re-elected.
As the election nears, Mr Meloni has received courtesies from both the centre-right Ms von der Leyen and France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
Le Pen, whose National Rally party is leading in French opinion polls, hopes to work with Meloni after the election to unite the divided far-right faction in the European Parliament into a new bipartisan coalition.
For now, the Italian leader is keeping his cards close to his chest.
But she says her goal is to put all of the EU’s left-wing parties into opposition.
Meloni’s party’s outsized influence is even more impressive given that it won just 6.4% of the vote and six seats in the last EU elections in 2019.
On the domestic stage, a dominant performance could help further strengthen Mr Meloni’s dominance in Italy’s notoriously volatile political landscape.
In the days leading up to the polls, the Prime Minister made frequent appearances in the national media to tout his ability to act as a bulwark against illegal immigration.
Public concern about the flow of illegal migrants across the Mediterranean was one of the key issues driving Meloni to take power in 2022.
She visited Albania on Wednesday, whose government has an agreement to house migrants rescued at sea in Italian territorial waters.
Overall, pre-vote opinion polls suggested that far-right parties could win around a quarter of the new EU parliament’s 720 seats.
The first day of voting in the Netherlands was on Thursday, with exit polls showing anti-immigration firebrand Geert Wilders’ party in second place.
But the strong performance of the Dutch pro-European parties provided some relief to centrist parties trying to rein in the far-right.
Von der Leyen’s conservative European People’s Party and the centre-left Socialists-Democrats are expected to remain the two largest parties in the European Parliament.
