Democracy Digest: Orban-Era Official Investigated, While Pride Returns to Budapest

Like the rest of Central Europe, Slovakia endured days of extreme heat before storms swept across the country. On June 30, the national temperature record was broken when the mercury reached 41.3°C. Much of the country is experiencing drought, while several towns have faced restrictions on drinking water use. The recent heatwave has exposed two broader issues: the vulnerability of Slovakia’s weather service and the lack of air conditioning in hospitals, public transport and other public facilities – a problem that some politicians have tried to downplay. Earlier this week, Dennik N reported that the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute’s system for providing weather information – including forecasts, storm alerts, temperature data and warnings – to the public, the armed forces and airports suffered a major outage and remained offline for several hours. The institute confirmed the failure but declined to provide further details. Despite the outage, Slovakia continued to receive weather information through foreign services and locally collected data that are not integrated into the institute’s national or international systems. Current and former employees have long warned about the institute’s deteriorating state, arguing that similar outages could happen again and, in the worst case, disrupt air traffic or even force the temporary closure of Slovak airspace. The institute, which falls under the Environment Ministry led by Tomas Taraba, has long struggled with underfunding and staff shortages. The heatwave also highlighted the limited availability of air conditioning in Slovakia’s healthcare system. Media reports described an employee fainting during surgery and patients enduring stifling temperatures in hospital wards, as many hospitals cool only the most critical areas. According to reports, the ageing buildings that house many hospitals make it difficult to install comprehensive air conditioning. Healthcare nevertheless receives one of the largest allocations from the state budget each year. Leading politicians’ responses to the heatwave have also attracted attention. Prime Minister Robert Fico visited road workers and brought them beer during the extreme temperatures, while Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Robert Kalinak noted that the government office also lacks air conditioning. “There is no air conditioning in the government office’s negotiating room, and we do not cry about it,” Kalinak told journalists.

Prime Minister Robert Fico is pressing ahead with plans to restart aluminium production at Slovalco, a smelter in central Slovakia owned by the financial group Penta and Norway’s Norsk Hydro, after several agreements were signed on July 1. Fico first raised the idea earlier this year, criticising Brussels for allowing aluminium imports from outside the EU while, in his view, forcing the closure of an environmentally efficient European producer. According to the prime minister, the first of Slovalco’s more than 200 furnaces should be brought back into operation after the summer. The plant shut down its furnaces in 2023 due to soaring electricity prices, resulting in around 300 redundancies. Under the agreements, the government has pledged to supply the plant with cheaper hydroelectric power for the next decade and to compensate it for the cost of emissions allowances. The compensation scheme, however, still requires approval from the European Commission. Fico also intends to urge Brussels to grant Slovalco a temporary exemption from the EU’s emissions trading scheme. Aluminium is an important raw material for the automotive and aerospace industries, and before its closure, Slovalco produced around 175,000 tonnes annually, accounting for roughly 15 per cent of the EU’s aluminium output. The opposition has criticised the plan as ad hoc and lacking a broader industrial strategy, while some media have pointed to Fico’s increasingly warm relationship with Penta, a group with which he previously had a strained relationship. Slovalco itself has cautioned that the agreed support will be sufficient to restart only part of its production. Reopening all of the furnaces, it says, would require additional state assistance.