Who is Robert Fico? Slovakia Prime Minister shot multiple times

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot multiple times after a political event Wednesday afternoon, an episode of violence that punctuated his decades-long career in politics.

A hospital official where Fico was being treated said on Thursday that he was in serious but stable condition, and that he was being kept in an intensive care unit after a five-hour surgery.

Fico, 59, was born in 1964 in what was then Czechoslovakia. A member of the Communist Party before the dissolution of communism, he took a law degree in 1986 and was first elected to Slovakia’s parliament in 1992 as a member of the Party of the Democratic Left.

He served for several years in the 1990s as a governmental agent representing the Slovak Republic before the European Court of Human Rights and the European Commission of Human Rights. In 1999, he became chairman of the Smer (Direction) party, of which he has been a pivotal figure ever since.