Robert Fico, 59, has played a crucial role in Slovak politics in the years since independence in 1993 and has been prime minister longer than any other leader.
The country became independent after the so-called Velvet Revolution, a series of popular and nonviolent protests in 1989 against the Communist Party in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Mr Fico, who had been a member of the Communist Party when it was in power, founded the Smer Party in the late 1990s and began the first of his three terms as prime minister in 2006. He served there for four years before going into opposition after his coalition. lost an election. Slovakia is a landlocked country with approximately 5 million inhabitants.
The Smer party, which started out politically on the left but has increasingly embraced right-wing views on immigration and cultural issues, has governed as part of a coalition. Much of the international discussion about Mr. Fico's leadership in recent years has focused on his ties with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Slovakia's southern neighbor.
Mr Fico returned to power in 2012 but resigned as prime minister in July 2018 after mass demonstrations over the murder of a journalist, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, which exposed government corruption. The protests, which rocked the country, were the largest since the Velvet Revolution; demonstrators demanded the government's resignation and new elections.
Slovakia is high in the rankings independent reviews of press freedom, but the demonstrators had also sought deeper changes in the country Fico had overseen.
He returned to power in elections last fall, forming a coalition government after winning about 23 percent of the vote after campaigning against sanctions imposed on Russia after its massive invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. The country's ammunition should be sent to Ukraine, he had told voters.
That stance, in a country where pro-Russian sentiment has traditionally been significant, worried EU leaders in Brussels, who said they feared Slovakia could be a dominant force. pro-Russian alliance with Mr Orbán and possibly Italian leader Georgia Meloni, support for Ukraine in the European Union would be hampered. At the time, it was also seen as a sign of the apparent erosion of the pro-Ukrainian bloc that Europe had formed after the invasion.
Slovakia's military contributions to Ukraine were negligible compared to countries such as the United States and Great Britain. But last year it became one of many European Union countries bordering Ukraine block import of its grain, for fear that this could undermine Slovak farmers.
In April, an ally of Mr Fico, Peter Pellegrini, won a vote to become president of Slovakia. The position is largely ceremonial, but analysts say the victory has strengthened the hold of political forces friendly to Russia in Central Europe, as Mr Pellegrini has opposed providing military and financial aid to Ukraine.