Slovak opposition parties accused the left-right cabinet of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico of securing favourable terms for Hungary by bringing the long-standing Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros hydroelectric power plant (HPP) System dispute to an end.

“I am asking why hand over 50% of this national treasure freely to the hands of Viktor Orbán and Hungary,” legislator Tamara Stohlová of centrist Progressive Slovakia (PS) stated during an opposition press conference on July 1 at which they called for a session at the parliamentary committee for the environment.  

Legislators from neoliberal SaS and populist right-wing Slovakia joined in the criticism, accusing Taraba of handing over the electricity to Hungary, state broadcaster STVR and other media reported.

The criticism comes shortly after the Minister of Environment, Tomáš Taraba, a nominee of the ultranationalist Slovak National Party (SNS), announced that Slovakia and Hungary are close to resolving a long-running dispute over the construction and operation of the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros HPP on the River Danube.

 “The agreement we are preparing has a great potential to ensure that Slovakia's relations with Hungary are tidy, balanced, transparent, and the Danube will not divide us, but unite us,” Taraba stated last week, adding that the deal “will not be kept secret”.

Before the press conference, the government-backed deal was also criticised by energy experts, including former Minister of Economy and energy expert Karel Hirman.

Fico’s cabinet plans to “hand over approximately 40-50% of produced energy for at least ten years to Hungary for production costs,” Hirman wrote on his Facebook social media page in response to Taraba and government statements, adding that “someone in Hungary will keep the profit.”

Taraba rejected the opposition criticism of the deal, describing it as “hoaxes,” adding that the deal is subject to parliamentary approval, where Fico’s coalition wields an unstable, narrow majority of 79 in the parliament of 150.

The agreement over the construction and operations of the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Hydroelectric Power Plant System was signed by former Czechoslovakia and Hungary, then both socialist Soviet bloc countries, in 1977, but Hungary unilaterally stepped down from the agreement in 1989 when most of the works on the Slovak side were completed.

The International Court in the Hague upheld the agreement in 1997 and Slovakia’s succession rights to the agreement.

Fico’s Smer party made a sharp shift into the national conservative waters while in opposition in 2020-2023, and after returning to power in 2023, Fico openly sought an alliance with Viktor Orbán, heralding a new era in the Slovak-Hungarian relations, which in the past were marked by strong anti-Hungarian Slovak nationalism, including in the 1990’s, when the Slovak strongman Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar was in power.

Fico and Orban became unlikely bedfellows also because they come from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Fico still declares himself a socialist (though his Smer party has been suspended from the PES European grouping because of his coalition with the far-right SNS party and his stance on the Ukraine war), while Orban sees himself as the leader of Europe’s radical right.

Slovakia and Hungary have also had a troubled relationship stemming from Budapest’s  domination of “Upper Hungary” for 1,000 years until 1918, and its frequent attempts since to speak out on behalf of Slovakia’s half a million ethnic Hungarians, who mainly live just across the Danube.

Slovak national identity was, in the words of political scientist Tim Haughton, “the dominant axis of competition” on which Mečiar based his dominance of Slovak politics following the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993. In the 1990s, the Slovak public sphere was filled with nationalist shouts such as “speak Slovak in Slovakia” and “send Hungarians over the Danube”.

“It was unthinkable in the 1990s that a Slovak leading nationalist such as [Andrej] Danko of SNS would support Hungarian politicians,” Zsolt Gal, a Slovak-Hungarian lecturer at the Comenius University in Bratislava, told bne IntelliNews in an interview in December 2023.