Fighting fire with fire? (Geo)political frustration and support for authoritarian leaders amongst liberal individuals.

The assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in May 2024 sparked a conspiracy theory claiming that it was staged for the political benefit of Smer’s leader. This conspiracy theory has gained some traction within the liberal opposition, a group that tends to ridicule the pro-conspiratorial tendencies of Fico’s government supporters. This contradictory behaviour is partly attributable to the growing frustration experienced by anti-government individuals in countries undergoing democratic backsliding. Paradoxically, considering the illiberal government and its leadership as the ultimate evil can lead seemingly pro-democracy individuals to justify autocratic means if they help to achieve their desired democratic end. Does political frustration lead to the justification of authoritarianism among self-proclaimed anti-illiberal individuals? In this paper, I use survey data from May 2025 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to address this question. Comparing the Czech Republic, which was ruled by a pro-EU and liberal coalition at the time of the survey, with Slovakia, which was governed by Robert Fico as the leader of an illiberal coalition, enables us to test the hypotheses of this paper in two cases where the levels of political and geopolitical frustration among liberal citizens differ significantly.