After a five-hour surgery on the day of the attack, Fico was operated for a second time today, which “contributed to the positive prognosis”, according to the Minister of Health, although he is still in “a stable but serious condition”. The Specialized Criminal Court (responsible for corruption, organized crime and terrorism) ordered to keep the attacker in preventive detention.
If the situation does turn out to be "he will likely make a good recovery, but not for a while" then what happens in the interim? What are the formalities of somebody stepping in for Fico on a de facto basis?
There is such a thing as Deputy PM, but it's a meaningless title held by *checks wiki* four different people (same as deputy party leader; KDH has three of them, Hlas four and Smer five). So far, it looks like the ministers are taking care of their own agenda while Robert Kaliňák (Fico's right-hand man for 20+ years) and Matúš Šutaj Eštok (likely soon-to-be leader of Hlas) are acting as Fico's spokesmen. If he's lucid and able to sign documents, I don't see why it couldn't stay like this for weeks or months. We don't have anything like PMQs that the PM is expected to attend and ministers can't be MPs, so he doesn't need to vote. There are only 17 ministers including the PM, state secretaries/junior ministers are irrelevant sinecures with no power or responbility and there's no culture of reshuffles, so you don't have people coming and going all the time. Some kind of collective leadership informally presided by Kaliňák while Fico officially remains PM should be fairly manageable unless one of the parties decides to throw a strop, but then that would cause a crisis even in normal circumstances.
