Do we like them?

Do we like Zuzana Čaputová?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in what we could read, and she took real personal heat for her job, but the evidence we could open was thin.

Zuzana Čaputová is a lawyer who became the first woman to be Slovakia's president, serving one term from 2019 to 2024. She ran with the backing of Progressive Slovakia, a party outside parliament at the time, and was known before politics as a public-interest lawyer rather than a career politician. She grew up in the town of Pezinok, near Bratislava.

Analysts at OSW said Fico's Smer party was the main source of the harshest attacks on her, and that she had also been targeted over her support for Ukraine and the transatlantic alliance. That is abuse aimed at her, and it doesn't count against her on either test. What counts is how she carried herself in office, and the sources we could read don't show her hitting back with anything nasty.

On the harm test, here's the honest bit: several pages we tried to open were blocked, so this rests on reporting that's thinner than usual. Nothing in what we saw has her pushing conspiracy theories, targeting minorities or denying climate science. Her campaigning background was on the environmental side, and we found no harmful words or acts, and no habit of working with people who push harm.

Since leaving office she took up a visiting fellowship at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute from September 2024. Stanford says the fellowship brings former heads of state to talk about global policy challenges, and its director said she'd have collaborators interested in Slovakia, rule of law and democracy. That's a quiet landing for someone who copped a rough few years.

The recent news is mild. She's booked for the 30th Pohoda festival in Trenčín alongside Petr Pavel, to debate identity in a polarised world. Nothing new has come out about her in the last few months beyond that.

Where does that leave us? We'd back her. She stayed in a job that brought threats to her and her family, and left on her own terms. The caveat is ours: with more pages open we could say more about her record on LGBTQ+ rights and the planet, and this card doesn't pretend otherwise.