Slovakia’s crackdown on NGOs echoes Putin’s playbook

Just as the United States is scaling back its enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), Donald Trump’s acolytes in Eastern Europe are doubling down on legislation that is ostensibly presented as local versions of FARA, though true inspiration for it comes from Russia, rather than from the US.

The Slovak parliament approved a draft bill last week which will crack down on civil society organisations that receive foreign funding, as well as on those that do not.

Originally, parliamentarians from Robert Fico’s governing coalition were seeking to impose far-reaching disclosure requirements on NGOs involved in ‘political lobbying’ – a category that their proposal left undefined.

While ‘lobbying’ and even references to ‘foreign agents’ were dropped from the final version of law, the new legislation subjects civil society organisations to the same freedom of information obligations as the public sector – supposedly because some NGOs receive public funding and also because the Slovak tax code allows for a version of tax-deductible gifts to charities.

Clearly, the requirement can be selectively weaponised, and quite easily so, particularly against smaller NGOs who are unlikely to be in a position to dedicate resources to comply with a flood of requests for information.

Instead of FARA, the Slovak law shares its DNA with Vladimir Putin’s infamous 2012 foreign agents law, which introduced far-reaching disclosure requirements on NGOs receiving foreign funding and involved in political activities, including mandatory labelling of all their written output as coming from ‘foreign agents’. Furthermore, non-compliance was criminalised – individuals caught participating in activities of ‘illegitimate’ NGOs could be sentenced to up to two years of prison or forced labour. 

In 2017, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán sought to introduce a similar law, masquerading as a version of FARA, into the Hungarian legal system, only for it to be struck down by the European Court of Justice.

Unconstrained by EU niceties, Georgia adopted its own law, prompting mass public protests. Most Georgian NGOs have refused to comply, and some have registered abroad to bypass the law’s requirements. This year, however, the ruling Georgian Dream Party is turning up the pressure by introducing new criminal penalties. 

“Over the past four years,” Georgia’s prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze claims, “there have been four attempts to organise a revolution in Georgia, all involving foreign agents and NGOs financed from abroad. This is completely unacceptable, and the transparency law is intended to prevent such attempts in the future.” 

While more cautious about clashing against EU law, such rhetoric is not alien to Slovakia’s Fico, who blamed George Soros, the Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist, and the US embassy for his ouster in 2018. Earlier this year, as his slim parliamentary majority faced large-scale protests, he suggested that “foreign specialists,” with experience from Georgia and Ukraine’s Maidan, were present in the country to orchestrate a putsch. One of his party officials, Erik Kaliňák, even made a trip to Georgia, supposedly to uncover connections between those opposing Georgian Dream and Slovakia’s political opposition.

It is not a conspiracy to suggest that budding authoritarians, from Moscow through Tbilisi to Budapest and Bratislava, are learning from each other. In fact, in addition to Fico’s well-publicised trip to Moscow before Christmas last year, a group of Slovak parliamentarians followed in his footsteps in early January – including, lo and behold, one of the authors of the new Slovak legislation, Adam Lučanský. 

Fico himself is a former member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, a vocal nostalgist of the communist era, and one of the few European leaders who have vowed to join Putin in Moscow again at the 9 May parade. However, that did not prevent him from being a guest of honour at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC in February. 

With a thin governing majority, Fico is not acting from a position of strength. Scapegoating NGOs and their supposed interference in Slovak politics might be a welcome distraction from the country’s looming economic woes, as Trump’s tariffs will likely drive Slovakia’s export-oriented automotive sector into a ditch in the coming months. But don’t expect Fico to back down. Things will likely have to get worse for Slovak democracy before they get any better.