When Slovakia’s minister for tradition fired the director of the nation’s oldest and most necessary theatre final Tuesday, the quite a few causes she cited for her shock transfer included “political activism”, an alleged desire for overseas over Slovak opera singers, and, bizarrely, an incident with a crystal chandelier.
Matej Drlička, whose dismissal from the Slovak Nationwide Theatre was adopted a day later by that of the director of the Slovak Nationwide Gallery, says the true motive is one thing else: a concerted crackdown on freedom of creative expression and a scientific assault on the central European republic’s state establishments underneath the watch of the populist prime minister Robert Fico.
“The reasons that [culture minister] Martina Šimkovičová listed are a compilation of full lies,” Drlička instructed the Observer. “The one motive is that her authorities doesn’t need tradition to be free.”
Fico returned to energy for a fourth spell as prime minister final October, governing in a coalition with the nationalist SNS and the centre-left Hlas events after his scandal-hit Smer social gathering gained parliamentary elections on the again of pledges to halt army help to Ukraine.
The 59-year-old politician made his first public look final month since surviving an assassination try on 15 Might, giving a speech during which he criticised the supposed growth of progressive ideologies and the west’s stance in direction of Russia.
Certainly one of his most divisive appointees has been the SNS tradition minister Šimkovičová, 52, a former TV presenter whose media profession was ended over anti-refugee posts on social media and who was nominated for “homophobe of the yr” by the Slovak human rights institute Inštitút ľudských práv in 2018.
Certainly one of Šimkovičová’s first actions in her put up was to renew cultural hyperlinks with Moscow, suspended after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
She has since dismissed the board of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, a physique designed to permit cultural organisations to use for funding with out having to go on to the ministry, in addition to withdrawing funding for Bratislava’s brutalist Home of Tradition and firing the heads of the Nationwide Library and kids’s museum Bibiana.
Her invoice to dissolve the general public service broadcaster RTVS and substitute it with a brand new entity underneath full management of the federal government sparked mass protests in June.
“Alarm bells went off when Šimkovičová took over the tradition portfolio final autumn,” mentioned Albin Sybera, a fellow of the central European coverage thinktank Visegrad Perception. “What we noticed once more final week is that these fears weren’t unfounded. We’re seeing a spreading of radical rightwing positions into Slovakia’s mainstream discourse.”
Each the long-serving Nationwide Gallery director Alexandra Kusá and Nationwide Theatre director Drlička loved robust worldwide reputations, with the latter’s dismissal coming simply days after he was awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters on the rank of knight by France’s tradition minister Rachida Dati.
Drlička instructed the Observer that he noticed “displaying the blind spots of our historical past” as a part of his theatre’s function, however insisted that he had not introduced his political opinions in his function as director. “I’m a supervisor,” he mentioned.
In her assertion to the press, Šimkovičová mentioned Drlička had “critically broken the status” of the theatre by not punishing these chargeable for a crystal chandelier that fell on to the stage throughout a efficiency on a kids’s day occasion in June. Drlička mentioned an worker had been disciplined for the incident, during which nobody was damage.
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The Fico authorities’s purge of Slovakia’s cultural establishments has drawn comparisons to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s systemic crackdown on range in media, theatre, movie and publishing. “This type of factor just isn’t solely taking place in Slovakia,” Kusá instructed ARTnews.
However Drlička prompt the dismissals could possibly be pushed primarily by spite reasonably than technique. “It’s potential that we might go down the Hungarian route and find yourself with a really obedient cultural subject,” he instructed the Observer. “But when Hungary is the objective, these aren’t the fitting individuals in cost. They aren’t that sensible.”
The federal government has but to nominate a successor to guide the celebrated Bratislava theatre. “They haven’t proposed an alternate imaginative and prescient. To say that these individuals have a grand imaginative and prescient for Slovak tradition could be to significantly overestimate them.”
As a successor to the ousted Nationwide Gallery director Kusá, the tradition ministry has introduced a enterprise supervisor with no observe document within the arts, Anton Bittner, describing him as a “supervisor and professional in stabilising organisations and their improvement”.
On Friday, Slovak media reported that Bittner had labored as a challenge supervisor at Penta, an funding group concerned in one of many largest corruption scandals in Slovakia’s historical past, although there aren’t any allegations he was concerned in monetary misconduct. Exterior his managerial actions, the information outlet aktuality.sk wrote, the brand new gallery supervisor used to supply companies in tao therapeutic, a conventional Chinese language medication.
“The minister claims that she is restoring normalcy to Slovakia,” mentioned Sybera. “However the figures she is introducing to the tradition sector appear to inform a special story.”
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