Independent Funding as a Tool for Ideological Control in Slovakia

Protesters in front of the FPU offices (sign reads "Slovak Culture ≠ Slovak Government"), January 15th, 2025 – © Antena network/Andrea Kalinova

In January 2025, the Slovak Arts Council (FPU), one of the two major independent funding programmes responsible for over 30 million euros, finalised some of its decisions on grant applications for the coming years. This wouldn't be unusual if they weren't so late, and further delays are expected to push independent cultural organisations to their existential limits. In some cases, they have been rejected without any valid explanation and without any financial support, as was the case with the long-standing festival Drama Queer. "The amount requested from the fund does not reflect the importance of the event for Slovak culture and art," claimed the FPU.

“I can't remember a year when, in January, cultural centres didn't know whether they would receive financial support for the coming year. Since the creation of the FPU, this may have happened only once,” said Laco Oravec, vice-chairman of the Antena network for independent culture, at a protest in January.

The FPU Council met again in February. One of the more controversial items on the agenda was the proposal for a new statute; which has been on the table since September and was put forward by Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičova’s nominees. Two points in the proposal sparked debate among Council members. The first controversial point argued for the exclusion of support for foreign culture and the second would change the method of selecting independent experts for committees. The second proposed change would give Council members full control over the system for appointing independent committee members. Currently, the majority of each committee’s members are randomly selected by a computer, with the rest appointed by the Council. The proposal put forward by Šimkovičova’s appointees states that all experts should be elected by the Council. The Open Culture! platform (OK!) claims that the proposal would “wipe out support for the majority of currently supported activities,” a position supported by the Association of Self-Governing Regions of Slovakia (SK8), which also criticised the proposal for further restricting the rights of its representative on the FPU board. The Council is expected to vote on the amended proposal in March.

Slavomír Lopúch, the previous representative of towns and municipalities on the Council, who was also nominated by Minister Šimkovičová, resigned in January. He was one of the council members protested against by the Association of Self-Governing Regions of Slovakia for lacking five years' experience, which is a basic qualification for the council.

Political advertisement by the Slovak National Party (SNS) reads “We have stopped the funding of LGBTI projects” – © Topky.sk/Ján Zemiar

Slowly but Steadily: An Organised Institutional Shift

The FPU Council is made up of the Director General, a 13-member Board of Directors, and 18 expert committees made up of a random selection of almost 300 industry professionals who assess grant applications. “In its 10 years of existence, the FPU has essentially become a well-functioning institution,“ said Jana Ambrózová of the initiative Not in our kroj, rejecting the exploitation of folk culture by extremists and politicians, during the February protest. In her opinion, the proposed change to the statutes would bring “unjustified changes without rational discussion,” that would limit the scope of traditional culture to only a kitsch.

The controversial amendment to the FPU law, which came into form in June 2024, placed decisive power over the fund in the hands of the far-right nationalist minister. With 7 out of 13 board members directly chosen by Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová as her nominees, she effectively has a say over subsidiary programmes worth almost €42 million. And her plans for the fund have been clear since the beginning of her term in 2023.

The Independent cultural platforms Antena and Open Culture! (OK!) claim that Minister Šimkovičová and her political appointees have “paralysed” the funding programmes in an attempt to ideologically control the independent funds, putting the existence of hundreds of cultural institutions, projects, and organisations at existential risk.

According to an 80-page report detailing the Ministry's abusive changes, some of the FPU’s nominated board members do not even meet the basic legal requirements—such as 5 years’ experience in the arts and culture sector. Some board members came out of nowhere, while no one from the previous management or the cultural community recognised their professional track record in the field. The OK! Platform has filed two cases with the Attorney General’s Office, and if it finds that the appointments were illegal, it could also overturn previous grant decisions.

The situation in the FPU is disintegrating as a result of the efforts of the current pro-nationalist and populist government. Its attempt to “purify” the Slovak cultural sector of “non-governmental organisations” and “progressive, liberal, and queer ideologies” is spearheaded by Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová and her second-in-command Lukáš Machala. Opposition parties have repeatedly called for both Šimkovičová and Machala to be sacked for their destructive efforts, and for creating a toxic environment in cultural institutions and the ministry itself.

Minister Šimkovičová, previously a TV presenter, was sacked for spreading misinformation about migrants. She later appeared on several disinformation channels spreading homophobic and racist messages, and in 2016 moved into politics, where she continued to appear on her own disinformation TV show in violation of the law. After the 2023 general election, she was appointedMinister of Culture by the Slovak National Party (SNS), amidst strong criticism from cultural institutions. 90 days after her appointment, almost 190,000 people signed a petition calling for her dismissal.

She began to replace the management of several major national institutions, such as the National Theater and the National Gallery, consolidating power and control. In line with the SNS party rhetoric, she cited progressive ideologies, LGBTQIA+ organisations, as well as NGOs as “abusing funding schemes." In January 2024, she promised that “LGBTQIA+ NGOs will not receive a single cent from the State budget.” In November, the first apparent results of her party's ideological war came to light with the results of another subsidiary scheme, where no projects for queer culture were supported. Support for queer culture has also been repeatedly rejected in 2019, when Minister of Culture Ľubica Laššáková (SMER) directly rejected all LGTBQIA+ projects against the recommendation of the expert committees.

Festivals such as Drama Queer, Rainbow Pride, or the Otherness Film Festival, which scored highly in the eyes of the expert committees, were excluded by Šimkovičová's board nominees.

The status quo also reflects an attempt by a larger coalition to ostracise NGOs, in a similar narrative to that of Russia's autocratic regime before it passed the “foreign agent law.”

In an ongoing political wrangle in the halls of the National Council, Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová and Environment Minister Tomáš Taraba are facing no-confidence motions from the opposition. So far they have been successfully fended off by a shaky coalition majority, which has refused to open a council meeting by simply not showing up. Demands for the dismissal of Minister Šimkovičová were also echoed by massive protests in August 2024 after she fired directors of prominent cultural institutions without any objective justification. Some directors only learned of their dismissal through the minister's press release. Two petitions with nearly 190,000 signatures calling for the minister’s immediate dismissal were investigated after Šimkovičová and Machala called them “manipulated” and filed a police report against artist and organiser Ilonu Németh.

Far-right party’s candidate Michaela Sahul wears a fake folklore costume from a Chinese e-shop. The political ad reads “Let's preserve our traditions. We have something to be proud of!” – © Slovak folklore without fake/Facebook

Politics and Pretentious Folklore

Traditional motifs on billboards, politicians posing in folklore costumes (sometimes even mistakenly wearing Ukrainian traditional motifs as in the case of far-right politician Marian Kotleba) present themselves as pro-traditional, stating that historical and traditional cultural representations are being displaced by "progressive liberal" ideologies.

“Due to drastic interventions in the functioning of the fund, even areas that the Ministry of Culture often talks about as the alpha and omega of our national identity, independence, and pride are at risk,” said Alžbeta Lukáčová, formerly a member of the FPU Council for Traditional Culture and Folklore.

 

But the reality is that a large part of the fund, which deals with traditional culture, folklore, and research, is still awaiting decisions from the Council, leaving festivals, events, and organisations in regions and small communities at risk of losing their support. At the FPU meeting in February the Council again failed to elect a sufficient number of folklore festival experts to approve applications.

Minister Martina Šimkovičová wearing a folklore costume at a folklore festival in Východná – © Martina Šimkovičová/Telegram

Funds for Friends

The first meeting in January showed that the board came unprepared, with gaps in its understanding of projects whose materials were fully available beforehand and of internal processes, said the chairwoman of the Committee for Literature and Periodicals, writer Veronika Šikulová, in an interview with Dennik N.

Although the majority of the projects in the periodical section that the Council had initially planned to reject were supported, it was clearly a case of favoritism, Šikulová explained.

In the case of the publication Literárny týždenník (Literary Weekly), which has repeatedly received low ratings from the advisory committees, the Council approved a budget of €57,000. The publication, which is linked to MP Roman Michelko (SNS), already received €20,000 euro directly from the Prime Minister’s reserves at the Slovak Government Office in May 2024 after being rejected by the FPU. Šikulová said that their application was a “copy-paste from the previous years” with no evidence of effort. Nevertheless, the Council approved their request after “expert discussion.”

Protesters in front of the FPU offices, December 18th, 2024 – © Antena network