Even by the standards of central Europe’s polarised politics, Slovak politicians stand out for their vitriolic discourse.

Barely minutes after Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot and left gravely injured on Wednesday, some of his allies accused the opposition and the media of having blood on their hands and threatened a clampdown.

L’uboš Blaha, deputy speaker of parliament and a senior member of Fico’s Smer party, told opposition MPs: “This is your work.”

“I want to express my deep disgust at what you have been doing here for the last few years. You, the liberal media, the political opposition, what kind of hatred did you spread towards Robert Fico? You built gallows for him.”

The shooting, which the government said was carried out by a “lone wolf” attacker with political motives, has left the country reeling and has raised questions about the threat that the spiral of toxicity poses to democracy just weeks before European parliamentary elections. 

“This tragic event should be a lesson to all of us,” Věra Jourová, European Commission vice-president, told the Financial Times. “All over Europe, we can see increased polarisation and hate . . . We have to understand that verbal violence can lead to physical violence.”

Many Slovaks see the assassination attempt as the culmination of months of verbal attacks, disinformation campaigns and even fist fights between the liberal opposition and allies of Fico, who returned to power in October.

Fico’s condition was described as serious but stable on Thursday after five hours of surgery on his bullet wounds. 

In a rare sign of unity, Slovakia’s outgoing liberal president, Zuzana Čaputová, joined her successor and Fico ally, Peter Pellegrini, to make a joint address on Thursday. “We are in complete agreement in condemning any violence,” said Čaputová. “Yesterday’s attack on Prime Minister Robert Fico is first and foremost a great human tragedy, but also an attack on democracy.”

Fico’s government also pledged to ease its campaign activities for the EU elections if other parties followed suit. 

In fact the shooting could allow Fico’s ruling coalition to reap significant benefits, both by gleaning a “clear sympathy vote” in June and by providing an opening to accelerate its clampdown on opposition media, said Misha Glenny, rector of the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences.

“There are risk-averse members of the Fico coalition who will try to moderate the course, but the coalition also needs to keep those who want to escalate things in order to survive” and maintain Fico’s parliamentary majority, said Juraj Medzihorsky, a Slovak assistant professor of social data science at Durham University.

One particular concern is the response of the ultranationalist SNS party that forms part of Fico’s three-way coalition. Its chair, Andrej Danko, warned that “a political war is beginning at this stage”.

Danko also promised “changes to the media” beyond Fico’s planned overhaul of the public broadcaster RTVS, which critics say threatens its editorial independence. Fico’s coalition also recently advanced legislation in parliament that could deprive non-government organisations of foreign funding. 

At the same time, Belgium’s prime minister Alexander de Croo told the FT there was a risk that vitriolic attacks and increased danger would deter people from entering politics. “There’s a French saying that when people who feel disgusted go away, you have only disgusting people stay.” 

In Bratislava, residents said they were stunned by Fico’s shooting, although many attributed it to the sharp degradation of political standards. 

“Politicians have been pouring a lot of oil on the fire here, so I think it was only a matter of time for something like that to happen. But that doesn’t mean that it was easy to imagine this could actually happen to our prime minister,” said Michal Venglar, a 33-year-old teacher.

Fico’s shooting has revived memories of another traumatic event in the Slovak psyche: the assassination of a 27-year-old investigative journalist and his fiancée in 2018. The reporter, Ján Kuciak, had been probing alleged collusion between government officials and organised crime. The furore over the killings forced Fico to resign as prime minister.

“It reminds me of the horror after the murder of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, when Slovakia received negative news all over the world, and today it is like that again,” Ivan Štefanec, an opposition member of the European parliament, wrote on Slovak news site SME.

Grigorij Mesežnikov, a political scientist and president of the Institute of Public Affairs think-tank, said Slovakia’s “very confrontational” politics could be attributed to an “incomplete democratic transformation” after the fall of communism and the persistence of “problematic value orientations” such as xenophobia and homophobia.

Like others, Mesežnikov suggested the ruling coalition could opt for more radicalisation. Conversely, Fico could use his near-death experience as a turning point and change his aggressive political approach, said Mesežnikov — but he was “sceptical” about whether that would happen.

Last year Fico built his stunning comeback to office partly on stoking social tensions and accusing incumbent politicians of mismanagement and weakness. The election campaign featured a fist fight between Fico’s current defence minister and a former prime minister. 

Following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Fico lambasted the then-government of Slovakia for allegedly violating national sovereignty by sending fighter jets to Kyiv at the request of Nato without parliamentary approval.

Some of Fico’s most virulent attacks were aimed at Čaputová — the popular liberal president has said that threats against her family were among the reasons that she did not seek re-election in April. Instead Fico’s coalition partner Pellegrini was elected after running a campaign accusing his pro-EU rival of wanting to deploy Slovak troops in Ukraine. 

“I would not want to put probabilities,” said Durham University’s Medzihorsky, “but the risk that things get worse is quite serious.”

Additional reporting by Alice Hancock in Brussels

Kansas City Chiefs player Harrison Butker, pictured at a press conference in February, is in hot water for his recent commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas.

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Kansas City Chiefs player Harrison Butker, pictured at a press conference in February, is in hot water for his recent commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas.

Chris Unger/Getty Images

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker stirred controversy off the field this weekend when he told a college graduating class that one of the “most important titles” a woman can hold is “homemaker.”

Butker denounced abortion rights, Pride Month, COVID-19 lockdowns and “the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion” in his commencement address at Benedictine College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Atchison, Kan.

The 28-year-old, a devout Catholic and father of two, also railed against “dangerous gender ideologies” and urged men to “fight against the cultural emasculation of men.” At one point, he addressed women specifically.

“I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you, how many of you are sitting here now about to cross the stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you’re going to get in your career,” he said. “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” Butker said.

The 20-minute speech has been viewed more than 455,000 times on YouTube since Saturday and generated considerable backlash — and memes — on social media, especially from people critical of his views on women. Many pointed out that Butker’s own mom is a clinical medical physicist.

Butker also drew ire from fans of Taylor Swift, who is dating fellow Chiefs player Travis Kelce, a relationship that has famously helped bring many new female fans to the NFL. Later in the speech, he quoted Swift — though not by name — while talking about what he sees as the problem of priests becoming “overly familiar” with their parishioners.

“This undue familiarity will prove to be problematic every time, because as my teammate’s girlfriend says, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt,’ ” he said, quoting a lyric from her song Bejeweled.

One Swift fan account joked about petitioning for the pop star to replace Butker as the Chiefs’ kicker. A real online petition, calling for the Chiefs to dismiss Butker for his “sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist remarks,” has gained 95,000 signatures and counting since Monday.

Butker and the team have not commented publicly on his speech and the backlash to it, though late Wednesday the NFL issued a statement distancing itself from it.

“Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior VP and chief diversity and inclusion officer told NPR on Thursday. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization.”

What else did Butker say?

Butker has been vocal about his faith, telling the Eternal Word Television Network in 2019 that he grew up Catholic but practiced less in high school and college before rediscovering his belief later in life.

Last year, Butker appeared in an ad for the nonprofit Catholic Vote urging Kansans to support a referendum that would limit abortion rights in the state (it was ultimately unsuccessful). He’s also one of several athletes who has partnered with a Catholic prayer app. And days after the Chiefs won this year’s Super Bowl, Butker spent a week “in reflection” at a monastery in California.

He also gave the commencement address at his alma mater Georgia Tech last year, in which he urged students to “get married and start a family.”

This time around, Butker started his speech by suggesting he had been reluctant to give it: He said he originally turned down the president’s invitation because he felt that one commencement speech was enough, “especially for someone who isn’t a professional speaker.”

He was persuaded, he said, in part by leadership’s argument about how many milestones graduating seniors had missed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As a group, you witnessed firsthand how bad leaders who don’t stay in their lane can have a negative impact on society,” he said in his opening remarks. “It is through this lens that I want to take stock of how we got to where we are and where we want to go as citizens, and yes, as Catholics.”

He criticized President Biden for his handling of the pandemic and his stance on abortion, which he said falsely suggests people can simultaneously be “both Catholic and pro-choice.”

Butker blamed “the pervasiveness of disorder” for the availability of procedures like abortion, IVF, surrogacy and euthanasia, as well as “a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media.”

At one point, he referenced an Associated Press article from earlier this month about the revival of conservative Catholicism that prominently featured Benedictine College as an example.

The school of roughly 2,000 gets top ratings from the Cardinal Newman Society, a nonprofit that promotes Catholic education in the U.S., for policies including offering daily mass and prohibiting campus speakers who “publicly oppose Catholic moral teaching.”

“I am certain the reporters at the AP could not have imagined that their attempt to rebuke and embarrass places and people like those here at Benedictine wouldn’t be met with anger, but instead with excitement and pride,” Butker said, before making an apparent reference to LGBTQ Pride Month in June.

“Not the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it,” he said, as laughter could be heard from the crowd.

How are people responding?

The official YouTube video of Butker’s speech shows the crowd standing and applauding at the end, though the AP reports that reactions among graduates were mixed. Several told the outlet they were surprised by his comments about women, priests and LGTBQ people.

Kassidy Neuner told the AP that the speech felt “degrading,” suggesting that only women can be homemakers.

“To point this out specifically that that’s what we’re looking forward to in life seems like our four years of hard work wasn’t really important,” said Neuner, who is planning on attending law school.

Butker’s comments have gotten some support, including on social media from football fan accounts and Christian and conservative media personalities.

“Christian men should be preaching this regularly,” tweeted former NFL player T.J. Moe. “Instead, it’s so taboo that when someone tells the obvious truth that anyone who holds a biblical worldview believes, it’s national news.”

Still, other public figures — including musicians Maren Morris and Flava Flav — were quick to disagree.

Even the official Kansas City account weighed in, tweeting on Wednesday that Butker resides not there but in a neighboring suburb, Lee’s Summit. The tweet has since been deleted and the account apologized for the tweet.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas tweeted that he believed Butker holds a “minority viewpoint” in the state but defended his right to express it.

“Grown folks have opinions, even if they play sports,” he wrote. “I disagree with many, but I recognize our right to different views.”

Justice Horn, the former chair of Kansas City’s LGBTQ Commission, was more critical, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that “Harrison Butker doesn’t represent Kansas City nor has he ever.” He called the city one that “welcomes, affirms and embraces our LGBQ+ community members.”

The Los Angeles Chargers also trolled Butker in its Sims-style schedule release video on Wednesday, which ends with a shot of his animated, number 7 jersey-wearing character cooking and arranging flowers in a kitchen.

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Joe Biden is set to impose tariffs on double-sided solar panel imports, as the president moves to protect US clean energy manufacturers and boost jobs ahead of November’s election.

US officials said the move would immediately end an exemption from Trump-era tariffs on imports of a type of panel unit often used in large solar projects, one of the fastest-growing forms of clean energy in the country. They will now attract a tariff rate of 14.25 per cent.

The steeper levy marks the latest protectionist move by the president, who is competing with Republican rival Donald Trump to court blue-collar voters in US manufacturing heartlands, with less than six months to go until the election.

On Tuesday, Biden sharply increased tariffs on Chinese imports including electric vehicles and solar cells, deepening trade tensions with Beijing and thrusting trade policy to the centre of the election battle.

US officials have warned that China is producing more goods than its own market can absorb, triggering fears that Beijing could use cheap exports to undercut producers in other countries.

Ali Zaidi, Biden’s climate adviser, said the US solar “investment boom” was threatened by “unfair and non-market practices taking place overseas”. 

“The Chinese solar panel overcapacity, now projected to be double world demand, threatens to undercut panel manufacturing and solar supply chains around the world,” Zaidi said.

The announcement from the Biden administration comes as US imports of cheap solar panels and cells, largely from south-east Asia, have soared to record highs. An overproduction of solar panels from China has led to a collapse in global panel prices, threatening US manufacturing plans.

The US imported 55 gigawatts of panels and 3.8GW of solar cells in 2023, with more than three-quarters of cell imports coming from Malaysia, South Korea and Vietnam, according to BloombergNEF.

Alongside the new tariff on double-sided panels, the US is also offering some relief to domestic developers still reliant on imported cells — the units that make up panels — by increasing the amount that can be imported without levies from 5GW to 12.GW.

While some companies have announced their intent to open solar cell factories since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act — aimed at boosting the domestic clean energy industry, among other goals — the US does not have any manufacturing capacity in operation.

The relief applies to cells imported from Asian countries except China, whose cell exports to the US face a 50 per cent tariff under the new regime announced on Tuesday.

“We know that the process of onshoring, friendshoring and frankly just diversifying the supply chains is not one that can be executed overnight,” said Zaidi.

Raising the quota would ensure manufacturers in the US would have solar cells available to them and would support expanded US solar manufacturing, he added. 

US manufacturers including First Solar and Heliene had called for the US International Trade Commission to remove the tariff exemption for double-sided panels.

But the increase in the cell quota could anger large US manufacturers that make their own cells, including First Solar and Qcells, which have petitioned for antidumping duties on south-east Asian solar cells.