“Islam has no place in Slovakia,” Fico told reporters in May. He warned that “migrants change the character of our country,” and declared he wouldn’t allow such change to affect his nation.
Fico has made similar pronouncements over the past year, as Syria’s escalating humanitarian crisis spilled over into Europe, bringing an unprecedented wave of migrants and refugees to the continent’s borders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel bucked popular opinion and welcomed refugees in 2015 — with roughly 1 million migrants arriving in Germany — but her decision fueled widespread ire, and gave momentum to her country’s Euroskeptic far-right.
Fico, like other politicians from Eastern and Central Europe, has argued both that his country has no obligation to house refugees and that, unlike the United States and leading Western European nations, had little experience of Muslim immigration.
“Since Slovakia is a Christian country, we cannot tolerate an influx of 300,000-400,000 Muslim immigrants who would like to start building mosques all over our land and trying to change the nature, culture and values of the state,” he said in January 2015. (Never mind that Slovakia’s present Muslim population is a fraction of a percentage point of its population and that no Brussels policy maker expects it to accommodate a particularly large number of asylum seekers.)
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