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Slovak prime minister urges to fight coronavirus like ‘communists’

"These were also the aliens, who spoiled our life and did not let us breathe freely," Igor Matovic said

Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic EPA-EFE/MARTIN DIVISEK

Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic

© EPA-EFE/MARTIN DIVISEK

PRAGUE, November 17. /TASS/. Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic has compared the coronavirus pandemic with the Communist Party’s rule in the country between February 1948 and late 1989.

"We need to fight the coronavirus like earlier the communists," Matovic said late on Monday after the crisis center’s meeting on combating the coronavirus infection in the republic.

"These were also the aliens, who spoiled our life and did not let us breathe freely. Now we have an alien here, the coronavirus," the Slovak prime minister said.

The prime minister made the statement ahead of Freedom and Democracy Day, a public holiday in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. On November 17, 1989 security forces of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic cracked down on the demonstration of students in Prague. This event triggered the so-called Velvet Revolution, which in December that year led to a change of the political regime in then Czechoslovakia.

The Slovak parliament passed a law earlier this month labeling the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (existed in 1921-1990) and its regional branch, the Communist Party of Slovakia (set up in 1948), a criminal organization.

According to the latest data, Slovakia’s coronavirus caseload exceeded 87,000. Some 526 citizens died of complications caused by the coronavirus in the past eight months and a half.

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