To the government that charged him, he was a “lone wolf,” an off-kilter individual representing nobody but himself when he pumped at least four bullets into Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.

The assassination attempt Wednesday, however, has put a spotlight on a far wider collective malfunction in Slovakia. In this country in Central Europe, society and political culture are so bitterly divided that the violence attributed to a man who authorities say acted alone has become yet another club with which each side can beat the other.

“There is a level of polarization that has never existed before in this country,” said Daniel Milo, a former government official responsible for tracking disinformation who now works for a technology company. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he added.

The COVID-19 pandemic, he said, hardened previously fluid lines into what have since become hostile camps, with little room for nuance. Roughly half the population welcomed vaccines and half rejected them. “It became: Are you for or against? Do you believe or not believe?” Milo said. And after COVID came the war in Ukraine, another source of division.

The suspect was promptly arrested Wednesday and charged with attempted premeditated murder, but authorities have not named him publicly. Slovak news outlets, citing police sources, identified him as a 71-year-old pensioner with a yen for poetry and protests.

Each side of the political divide quickly put him to use as a foil, with its claims tailored to match. For supporters of Fico who took to social media sites this week, the suspect was the carrier of a liberal virus that must be eliminated. The prime minister’s critics painted him as a right-wing extremist.

A particularly vituperative government supporter demanded in a message on Telegram that the government hand out guns “and we will deal with the liberals ourselves.”

The interior minister, Matus Sutaj Estok, warned, “We are on the doorstep of a civil war. The assassination attempt on the prime minister is a confirmation of that.”

“Many of you sowed hatred, and it turned into a storm,” the minister added.

Sutaj Estok oversees the security forces, including Fico’s security. He acknowledged claims that lax security had allowed the shooter to get so close and open fire, but appeared to reject the idea. He said he had seen no evidence of unprofessionalism, noting that the leader of the department responsible for protecting senior officials was so close to the action that “his whole suit was covered in blood.”

Andrea Dobiasova, a spokesperson for the Inspection Service, which is part of the police force, said the office had opened an investigation into the response of security officers at the scene.

Senior officials in Fico’s governing Smer party have, in effect, accused liberal journalists and opposition politicians of motivating the shooter to open fire.

Lubos Blaha, the vice chair of the party, said the opposition and “the liberal media” had “built a gallows” for the prime minister by “spreading so much hatred.” Rudolf Huliak, an ally of the government from the far-right Slovak National Party, said progressives and journalists “have Robert Fico’s blood on their hands.”

Such accusations fit into what Pavol Hardos, a political scientist at Comenius University in Bratislava, the capital, described as a long campaign by Fico’s government to verbally attack not only political rivals but also their legitimacy. Before he was shot Wednesday, Fico denounced an opposition leader as “worse than a rat.”

Fico is pushing a strongly contested overhaul of the judiciary to limit the scope of corruption investigations, to reshape the national broadcasting system to purge what the government calls liberal bias and to crack down on foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations. He opposes military aid to Ukraine, LGBTQ+ rights and the power of the European Union, and he favors friendly relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

On Thursday, Zuzana Caputova, the country’s departing president, stressed that the shooting was an “individual act” and said she would invite leaders from Slovakia’s main political parties to meet in order to “calm down the situation.”

“We have difference of opinions, but let’s not spread hatred,” she said in a statement alongside the president-elect, Peter Pellegrini.

Dominika Hajdu, a researcher with Globsec, a research group in Bratislava, said a big reason for the heated atmosphere was that the country, which has about 5.5 million people, had been in “a constant political campaign” since the fall. A legislative election in September brought Fico to power; it was followed by two rounds of a presidential contest in March and April, and now a campaign for the European Parliament.

“Election campaigns by definition mean more heat and more political attacks,” she said.

But, she added, Slovakia’s deep divisions also flow in part from its history — centuries under Austrian and Hungarian rule, followed by seven decades as part of a Czech-dominated Czechoslovakia, most of that time under the Soviet thumb. It was a nominally separate state for six years as a puppet of Nazi Germany. Only in 1993, after the collapse of communism and the division of Czechoslovakia, did Slovakia become a fully independent country.

“The key national narrative is that we have always been oppressed by somebody — by the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Soviets or whomever,” Hadju said. “We always feel that there is a group endangering us, and this leads to a very divisive style of politics.”

Fico, a combative veteran politician widely loathed by Bratislava liberals but popular outside the capital, was shot multiple times Wednesday, taking at least one bullet in his abdomen in what his government called a politically motivated assassination attempt.

The shooting occurred after meetings with local officials and supporters in Handlova, a town in central Slovakia that voted heavily for his party in September.

Officials said Thursday that Fico’s condition had stabilized after emergency surgery overnight. But, the deputy prime minister said at a news conference, he was “not out of a life-threatening situation.” He said Fico had only a “limited” ability to communicate and faced a “difficult” recovery.

The New York Times News Service