In late February, a Slovakian military jet secretly took off for Moscow in the dead of night. When it returned to the eastern city of Kosice the next day, Slovakian Prime Minister Igor Matovic was there to meet it on the tarmac, announcing that the plane held the first shipment of an expected 2 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.
Top government officials were stunned. Many said they had been given no advance warning that Matovic planned to buy the vaccine, which has not been cleared by European Union regulators.
Rather than being hailed as a hero, Matovic soon faced mounting pressure to resign amid a mass exodus of top government officials. Once considered a pandemic success story, Slovakia now has one of the highest coronavirus death rates in the Western world, and its fragile governing coalition has grown increasingly splintered over the past year. For some cabinet members, Matovic’s decision to unilaterally purchase millions of unapproved vaccine doses was the final straw.
On Sunday, Matovic announced that he would step down as prime minister and swap places with Finance Minister Eduard Heger, a member of his Ordinary People party, “in order for the coalition to continue.”
His resignation came after Slovakia’s health, economic, justice, education, and foreign affairs ministers stepped down from their posts, while multiple members of parliament walked away from Matovic’s center-right coalition. One of the MPs who quit, Tomas Valasek, expressed concerns that buying Russia’s vaccine meant “spitting in the face of our European partners,” according to news outlet SME.
For the past year, Slovakia has been governed by a four-way coalition, which frequently led to infighting. A party in the ruling coalition finalized a withdrawal from the government on Thursday, saying it would rejoin when the prime minister resigned, the Associated Press reported.
Slovak President Zuzana Caputova called for Matovic’s resignation last week, saying that it was “dangerous and reckless” for the country’s leadership to be mired in disputes at a time when the pandemic is overwhelming hospitals and health-care workers.
Slovakia has administered roughly 14,000 vaccine doses for every 100,000 people, on par with countries including Austria, Switzerland and Norway. Matovic had hoped to speed up the country’s rollout by purchasing Russia’s vaccine because the European Union does not ban member states from granting their own emergency authorization to drugs that have not yet been approved for use throughout the bloc.
But critics did not like the idea of Slovakia being the only E.U. nation besides Hungary to use the unapproved vaccine — or Matovic’s decision to act unilaterally. Frustration with the country’s handling of the pandemic was already building, prompted by what has been characterized as “disastrous” and “chaotic” management.
Last spring, Slovakia’s strict lockdown and border closures allowed the country to fare much better than many of its European neighbors. But as fatigue grew, restrictions were lifted, and the country now has reported more per capita deaths from the virus than the United States, Mexico or Brazil. Some experts say Matovic made a crucial misstep by insisting that regular nationwide testing could replace a hard lockdown when infections rose in the fall, ushering in a crisis that has overwhelmed the country’s limited health-care infrastructure.
Tougher new restrictions were announced in February, but health officials have complained that the regulations are rarely enforced and little attention is paid to whether infected people self-quarantine, according to German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
Matovic’s resignation means the governing coalition will remain intact, and it prevents the country from having to hold a snap election.

