DISINFORMATION

Epilogue of the discrediting campaign against Michal Šimečka and the opposition

Infosecurity.sk presents an overview of disinformation trends that have been on the rise in the last two weeks:

• The dismissal of Michal Šimečka from the position of Deputy Speaker of Parliament was accompanied by a prolonged discrediting campaign and false narratives. Over the past weeks, disinformation agents have been working mainly with alleged evidence of dubious machinations in the allocation of subsidies from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Justice to NGOs in which members of Šimečka's family are active. In many cases, the information (for example, the results of the audit of the Ministry of Justice) were purposefully and misleadingly presented.
• Particular attention was paid by disinformation agents to the activities of Šimečka's father, Martin M. Šimečka, and his partner, Sona Ferienčíková, who was allegedly drawing a disproportionate amount of funding from the Fund for the Support of the Arts and enriching herself in this way. However, the grants to her civic association are transparently disclosed and were used for the activities of the association, not as personal remuneration.
• The effort to discredit Šimečka and his family members through repeating lies about the subsidies has also been directed towards delegitimizing opposition protests. According to the disinformation actors, these were intended to maintain the financial interests of the 'Šimečka clan'. There were also lies that the Progressive Slovakia (PS) party and the liberals were supposed to incite society to hatred and violence through the protests.

Šimečka's dismissal was preceded by a deceptive discrediting campaign

The past few weeks have been marked by a discrediting campaign directed against the chair of the Progressive Slovakia party and leader of the opposition, Michal Šimečka. He was attacked by disinformation actors in an attempt to portray him as an internal enemy of Slovakia, with the final goal being his dismissal from his position as deputy speaker of parliament. This finally happened on Tuesday 17 September 2024.

In addition to the ad hominem attacks on Šimečka, there were also manipulations and misleading statements about members of his family, which we have already reported on in a previous report. The narratives about the alleged suspicious use of public funds through NGOs were later supplemented by other reasons for which Šimečka should have been removed from office. The proposal by a group of SNS and SMER-SSD MPs to vote on Šimečka's dismissal thus argued his alleged efforts to polarize society through opposition protests or links to the Denník N media, which we discuss below.

All the arguments used were built on assumptions, misdirection and fabricated "evidence". For example, the argument about the alleged influence of Michal Šimečka on Denník N through his father Martin M. Šimečka, who is a shareholder of the media outlet, stands on feet of clay. The share of the politician's father in the media does not exceed 0.5% of the employee shares. Despite this, there have been misinterpretations and conclusions such as that the newspaper can be "called the party media of Progressive Slovakia".

Misleading rhetoric on the subject regularly appeared in the Telegram posts of Ľuboš Blaha, MEP for SMER-SSD. In one of his posts, he conspired about the so-called progressive mafia, which was supposed to enable the "Šimečka clan" to make hundreds of thousands of euros and to cover up for the former Minister of Justice, Mária Kolíková. Blaha's post included the accusation that they "arbitrarily changed the commissions that decide on subsidies just so that Šimečka's mother could get money from the state". The politician was thus trying to establish a narrative of a "subsidy mafia", thanks to which the "liberal NGOs" were supposed to get rich.

According to Blaha, Michal Šimečka "has become a symbol of corruption and cronyism". He repeated the same lies and half-truths in several posts on Telegram in order to attack the emotions of his audience. In particular, he exploited the fear of low incomes, in opposition to which the enormous profits of the Šimečka family were supposed to stand: "Ordinary citizens never received anything, but progressive NGOs, including the Šimečka clan, received millions".

Blaha continued to refer to the legitimate use of subsidies through appeals from the responsible authorities as "stealing" and tried hard to portray Šimečka as a scarecrow. He did not hesitate to resort to dehumanization: "A leech who squeezed the state through its family and then called protests when we stopped the financial flows to it - it has no right to sit in the post of deputy speaker of parliament". The deputy chairman of SMER-SSD did not comment on the publication of the list of connections of selected coalition politicians who also received state subsidies (including through family members). This list was published by the Progressive Slovakia party to point out that drawing financial resources from the state for civic activities is not an offence, on the contrary, it is a normal part of the running of the state. The list also highlights the hypocrisy and falsity of the accusations made by the ruling coalition.

In addition to Blaha, several other politicians of the ruling coalition, as well as various disinfluencers in the online space, rode on the wave of lies and manipulations. In a Facebook video, Blaha's party colleague Erik Kaliňák accused Šimečka of being guilty against transparency and honesty when he allegedly concealed the fact that his family had extracted more than one million euros from the Ministry of Culture and Justice over the past four years. According to Kaliňák, this is why there ought to have been a conflict of interest when Šimečka called protests for the dismissal of the ministers of both ministries. Manipulatively, he was hinting at some dark interest of the leader of the opposition, while neglecting the political misdeeds of both ministers and his colleagues (the purges in the culture and the incident when the minister of justice released a legal convict).

Some of the allegations have since been investigated by Transparency International. According to the organization's findings, there was no conflict of interest in the case of the subsidy from the Fund for the Promotion of Arts (FPU) to the association Projekt Fórum, where the mother of PS leader Marta Šimečková is the chairwoman [the subsidy was mentioned in Ľuboš Blaha's post above]. Moreover, the association has been successful in the fund since 2018, i.e. still under the SMER–SSD's government. A similar pattern has been demonstrated for grants from the Ministry of Justice to support civil society and human rights.

Calls for Šimečka's resignation on the basis of misleading "evidence" came not only from Blaha and Kaliňák, but also from Minister of the Interior Matúš Šutaj Eštok (Hlas-SD). He reiterated that it was supposed to be about one million euros of public funds received by Šimečka's family over a period of four years, while the subsidies were accompanied by serious suspicions of multiple violations of the law. According to Šutaj Eštok, the stepping down was to help Šimečka avoid "the shame he may face alongside further revelations of nepotism, clientelism and manipulation of public finances".

The Minister of the Interior and other representatives of the coalition, who lobbied for Šimečka's dismissal from the position of Deputy Speaker of the Parliament of the Slovak Republic, argued primarily with information from an audit of the allocation of subsidies to NGOs at the Ministry of Justice led by Boris Susko (SMER-SSD). The audit was supposed to show that "the provision of subsidies was set up in a non-transparent manner and the assessment processes were subjectively interfered with".

However, the internal audit presented as evidence by Prime Minister Robert Fico was in many respects purposely misinterpreted and several essential pieces of information were withheld. According to the findings of the daily SME, it is crucial that the audit does not establish a conflict of interest of the members of the commission in the case of the above-mentioned subsidy appeal for the protection of human rights in favor of Šimečka or his family. At the same time, no part of it concludes that any member of the commission was told how to make decisions, as Prime Minister Fico tried to portray it.

Since the posts containing narratives related to the dismissal of opposition leader Michal Šimečka were among the dominant ones in the Slovak information space in the last two weeks, we also looked at them using the analytical tool Gerulata Juno. We used it to analyze the most popular posts on Slovak Facebook that contained the keyword "Šimečka" or "dismissal" ("Šimečka" or "odvolávanie"). We excluded from the list those posts that did not contain problematic narratives. We then evaluated the posts based on the total number of interactions (the sum of all reactions, comments, and shares).

The post with the most interactions belongs to Lívia Pavlíková, an unsuccessful candidate in the European Parliament elections for the far-right Republika movement. In the video, Pavlíková mocked Michal Šimečka's partner Soňa Ferienčíková for the way she danced in one of her public appearances. She referred to the dancing as a bizarreness for which no admission fee should be charged: "How can anyone ask for money for this? Her NGO has received 190,000 euros from the state for such activities in recent years. I am not surprised that this is Michal Šimečka's wife." In this way, the representative of the disinformation portal Kulturblog tried to defame Šimečka himself, when she followed up on the topic of allegedly dubious state subsidies for her association BOD.Y, which we discuss below.

The second post was published with a profile titled Hrica Lubos. The post consists of an attack on Michal Šimečka and his family. In the video, Hrica claims that Šimečka "has been taking subsidies all his life for nonsensical obscenities," even though the subsidies we describe below were intended for specific activities of organizations, and thus were not about the salary or the compensation of Šimečka's mother and partner. Hrica also attacked Šimečka's work in the European Parliament, where he allegedly "did nothing for Slovakia", but on the contrary, "threw logs under the feet not only of Slovakia, but also of other states".

In the third post, Erik Kaliňák reported on an alleged conflict of interest in organizing opposition protests for the dismissal of Ministers of Culture and Justice. According to the SMER-SSD MEP, the conflict should have arisen after the Šimečka family extracted more than one million euros from both ministries over the last four years through subsidies. Among other things, Kaliňák mocked Šimečka's partner Ferienčíková, who works as a dancer, choreographer and founder of the BOD.Y civic association, and tried to create the impression that she was dubiously drawing state subsidies. In line with the rhetoric of the representatives of the ruling coalition, Kaliňák exploited the fact that since 2016 Ferienčíková had received FPU subsidies for her association. The politician tried to portray the situation as an example of non-transparency and enrichment of the Šimečka family. In fact, all subsidies to BOD.Y are registered in the list of projects on the FPU website, which also shows that the association has never been allocated the amounts as requested and in three cases the application was rejected.

The next post in the list was published by the Minister of the Interior Matúš Šutaj Eštok. In the video, he joins the rhetoric of the representatives of the ruling coalition who handled the topic of subsidies of the family members and relatives of Michal Šimečka manipulatively. The politician portrayed the situation in the sense that Šimečka's family was "living off public money", while the subsidies were to be accompanied by serious allegations of multiple violations of the law. Šutaj Eštok claimed that Šimečka had raised suspicions of cronyism, corruption and clientelism in society. These allegations, according to the minister, were to be proven by information from an audit of the Ministry of Justice's allocation of subsidies to NGOs. However, the audit itself had been purposely interpreted and several essential pieces of information had been withheld. In the case of the Ministry of Justice's human rights subsidy appeal to the Foundation of Milan Šimečka, the audit did not establish a conflict of interest with the members of the commission in favor of Michal Šimečka or his family. Furthermore, Šimečka has nothing in common with the Foundation, except his name, and just like the BOD.Y civic association of Soňa Ferienčíková or the organization Projekt Fórum of Šimečka's mother Marta Šimečková, the Foundation of Milan Šimečka also received state subsidies at the time when SMER-SSD was in power.

The last place belongs to the post by Milan Uhrík. In it, the chairman of the far-right Republika calls on the deputies of the Hlas-SD party not to keep Michal Šimečka, the leader of the opposition, in office during the vote to dismiss him. He said it would be a snub "to all people who reject the state being squeezed by political NGOs." Uhrík thus picked up on the rhetoric of the rest of the disinformation ecosystem. Like other actors, he also used the dismissal of the PS chairman to demonize the activities of the NGO sector, whose actors are often manipulatively portrayed as unwanted or harmful to Slovakia's interests.

Attacks on the opposition continued thanks to the topic of the protests

Efforts to discredit the opposition protests called during the summer months have resurfaced. They mainly called for negotiations on the dismissal of the Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová (SNS) and the Minister of Justice Boris Susko (SMER-SSD). Šutaj Eštok, for example, reinforced the false narrative that the protests were only meant to be a tool to preserve the financial interests of the Šimečka family.

Judita Laššáková, a MEP for SMER-SSD and a well-known face of the disinformation scene, spread the same narrative in a Facebook video. She claimed that calling protests just after both ministries cancelled subsidies for the Foundation of Milan Šimečka could not be a coincidence. The fact that the foundation bears only the name of Šimečka's grandfather, who was a dissident, has been pointed out many times. Nevertheless, this organization has also became a tool to discredit Šimečka and to associate him with the long-demonized non-governmental sphere.

Ľuboš Blaha tried to portray the opposition parties, especially the PS, as agents of tension and aggression in society. In a Telegram post from 2 September, he spoke of being verbally assaulted several times while taking a walk with his children. It is not clear from the text the identity or background of the assailants in question, but Blaha automatically described them as "mediocre” supporters of PS. He also portrayed the incidents as frequent, trying to attribute responsibility to the PS and to Šimečka himself: "Just in today's two-hour walk, there were three primitives who started jumping like that. That's a record. Obviously they are properly heated. Šimečka's work."

Along with the PS leader, Blaha's attack was once again earned by the mainstream media, which allegedly "made a murderer out of Cintula" and continue to try to brainwash people so that they can "succeed in liquidating someone from Smer". According to Blaha, such "victims of liberal brainwashing" hate Slovakia, "hate Smer with a sick hatred" and "would prefer to kill Fico and Blaha". In this manipulative way, and without any data, Blaha generalises the perception of specific topics among PS voters, trying to attribute to them negative qualities that he deliberately associates with liberalism.

Robert Fico himself, who was the target of an armed attempt on his life in Handlová in May 2024, referred to Cintula (the attacker) as "the extended arm of the opposition". At a press conference in Handlová on 7 September, Fico said he forgave the attacker because he was a tool in someone else's hands, or was an opposition activist. He subsequently identified the opposition as the culprit, which had systematically incited hatred in society. This is a recurring narrative that we have already covered in reports.

Fico also added at the press conference that the opposition and part of the media refused to respect the results of last year's parliamentary elections. At the protests, they allegedly spread hateful messages that Fico should be hanged and the government executed. No context or evidence was provided as to whether such claims were regularly made and motivated by official speakers. Ľuboš Blaha also returned to the topic of the attempted assassination in a post on Telegram, claiming, like Fico, that the opposition bears political responsibility for the attempted murder of the prime minister.

The aforementioned posts and statements on the topics of opposition protests, as well as state subsidies from the Ministries of Culture and Justice, have thus purposefully manipulated the discourse in order to demonize opposition parties and their representatives. Just before the planned dismissal of Šimečka from the position of Deputy Speaker of Parliament, the rhetoric thus created an atmosphere of distrust and doubt towards the opposition, which is deliberately described in the eyes of the public as corrupt, irresponsible or incompetent.

Project Infosecurity.sk organized by Adapt Institute, which is supported by the Prague office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, continuously monitors the activities of both Slovak and foreign disinformation actors, but focuses mainly on the former. The project activities are built upon daily monitoring of emerging disinformation, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories in the online information space. This approach allows the analysts to identify disinformation posts and narratives that resonated with the public the most, as well as to find out where they originated, and how they spread and evolved on social media. The report takes the form of a bi-weekly summary of arising trends in the spread of malicious information content online. Based on that, Infosecurity.sk can inform the public about emerging and current trends in the field of disinformation, manipulation, and propaganda.