When Slovakia’s minister for culture fired the director of the country’s oldest and most important theatre last Tuesday, the numerous reasons she cited for her surprise move included “political activism”, an alleged preference for foreign over Slovak opera singers, and, bizarrely, an incident with a crystal chandelier.

Matej Drlička, whose dismissal from the Slovak National Theatre was followed a day later by that of the director of the Slovak National Gallery, says the real reason is something else: a concerted crackdown on freedom of artistic expression and a systematic assault on the central European republic’s state institutions under the watch of the populist prime minister Robert Fico.

“The explanations that [culture minister] Martina Šimkovičová listed are a compilation of complete lies,” Drlička told the Observer. “The only reason is that her government doesn’t want culture to be free.”

Fico returned to power for a fourth spell as prime minister last October, governing in a coalition with the nationalist SNS and the centre-left Hlas parties after his scandal-hit Smer party won parliamentary elections on the back of pledges to halt military aid to Ukraine.

The 59-year-old politician made his first public appearance last month since surviving an assassination attempt on 15 May, giving a speech in which he criticised the supposed expansion of progressive ideologies and the west’s stance towards Russia.

One of his most divisive appointees has been the SNS culture minister Šimkovičová, 52, a former TV presenter whose media career was ended over anti-refugee posts on social media and who was nominated for “homophobe of the year” by the Slovak human rights institute Inštitút ľudských práv in 2018.

One of Šimkovičová’s first actions in her post was to resume cultural links with Moscow, suspended after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

She has since dismissed the board of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, a body designed to allow cultural organisations to apply for funding without having to go directly to the ministry, as well as withdrawing funding for Bratislava’s brutalist House of Culture and firing the heads of the National Library and children’s museum Bibiana.

Her bill to dissolve the public service broadcaster RTVS and replace it with a new entity under full control of the government sparked mass protests in June.

“Alarm bells went off when Šimkovičová took over the culture portfolio last autumn,” said Albin Sybera, a fellow of the central European policy thinktank Visegrad Insight. “What we saw again last week is that those fears were not unfounded. We are seeing a spreading of radical rightwing positions into Slovakia’s mainstream discourse.”

Both the long-serving National Gallery director Alexandra Kusá and National Theatre director Drlička enjoyed strong international reputations, with the latter’s dismissal coming just days after he was awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters at the rank of knight by France’s culture minister Rachida Dati.

Drlička told the Observer that he saw “showing the blind spots of our history” as part of his theatre’s role, but insisted that he had not presented his political views in his role as director. “I am a manager,” he said.

In her statement to the press, Šimkovičová said Drlička had “seriously damaged the reputation” of the theatre by not punishing those responsible for a crystal chandelier that fell on to the stage during a performance on a children’s day event in June. Drlička said an employee had been disciplined for the incident, in which no one was hurt.

The Fico government’s purge of Slovakia’s cultural institutions has drawn comparisons to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s systemic crackdown on diversity in media, theatre, film and publishing. “This kind of thing is not only happening in Slovakia,” Kusá told ARTnews.

But Drlička suggested the dismissals could be driven mainly by spite rather than strategy. “It’s possible that we could go down the Hungarian route and end up with a very obedient cultural field,” he told the Observer. “But if Hungary is the goal, these are not the right people in charge. They are not that smart.”

The government has yet to appoint a successor to lead the prestigious Bratislava theatre. “They haven’t proposed an alternative vision. To say that these people have a grand vision for Slovak culture would be to seriously overestimate them.”

As a successor to the ousted National Gallery director Kusá, the culture ministry has presented a business manager with no track record in the arts, Anton Bittner, describing him as a “manager and expert in stabilising organisations and their development”.

On Friday, Slovak media reported that Bittner had worked as a project manager at Penta, an investment group involved in one of the largest corruption scandals in Slovakia’s history, though there are no allegations he was involved in financial misconduct. Outside his managerial activities, the news outlet aktuality.sk wrote, the new gallery manager used to offer services in tao healing, a traditional Chinese medicine.

“The minister claims that she is restoring normalcy to Slovakia,” said Sybera. “But the figures she is introducing to the culture sector seem to tell a different story.”