BRATISLAVA — Chalk one up for Slovakia’s Robert Fico.

At first glance, the former prime minister looks like a man whose career has gone off a cliff.

Fico, who heads Slovakia’s social democratic party, Smer, was forced to resign this month amid the largest protests the country has seen since the Velvet Revolution — demonstrations triggered by the gangland-style killing in late February of a journalist who had been exploring links between the Italian mafia and Slovakia’s political establishment.

Support for Smer, which Fico helped start in 1999, has gone through the floor. The party has lost one-fifth of its support over the past month and is now teetering at about 20 percent, according to recent polls.

Yet somehow, Fico, 53, has managed to keep his hold over Slovakian politics. He installed a close ally as prime minister, while defending his position as the leader of Smer, still Slovakia’s largest party and dominant political force. On Monday, the three-party government coalition he put together survived a confidence vote. The recent wave of protests, meanwhile, has begun to die down.

“Corruption has become a way of life in Slovakia" — Peter Bárdy, editor of Aktuality.sk

Peter Bárdy, the editor of Aktuality.sk, the investigative online news outlet where the murdered reporter Ján Kuciak worked, says it would be a mistake to underestimate Fico’s political instincts. (Aktuality.sk is co-owned by Axel Springer, which is also co-owner of POLITICO’s European edition.)

“For me, Fico is the Master of Puppets,” said Bárdy, referring to the 1986 Metallica album about the allure and abuse of power. Sitting outside the modern newsroom in central Bratislava where Kuciak worked, Bárdy said it is too early to predict where the protest movement would take Slovak politics.

The absence of a credible opposition force is the main reason for Fico’s survival thus far.

Despite its crumbling support, Smer remains the leader in the polls, followed by Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), a libertarian Euroskeptic party led by MEP Richard Sulík, with about 14 percent. A clutch of smaller parties, including the neo-Nazi Kotleba party, rounds out the field.

That fragmentation means that it could take as many as six parties to form a government without Smer.

Events in the country are being closely watched in Berlin, Paris and Brussels as European leaders begin the process of reforming the EU.

Fico, who became prime minister in 2006 and held the post almost uninterrupted until his resignation this month, was seen as an anchor of stability in a difficult region. While he has flirted with populism on issues such as migration, he counts as a moderate compared to much of the rest of Slovakia’s political class.

At a time of disarray in Czech politics and severe tension between the EU and both Poland and Hungary, Europe needs Slovakia — the only country in the region that belongs to the euro — as a bulwark in Central Europe.

The question is whether Fico has the credibility to play that role. Even if it’s too early to write his political obituary, there’s no denying he’s been weakened.

Kuciak had uncovered ties between senior members of the Calabrian mafia, known as the 'Ndrangheta, and an aide to Fico.

Slovaks are no strangers to political corruption, having endured years of autocratic rule under then-Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar in the 1990s. As is common in the region, seemingly untouchable oligarchs control much of the country’s economy while quietly wielding political power behind the scenes.

Dana Meager, deputy finance minister and a member of the conservative Slovak National Party, said she wasn’t convinced that the mafia was behind the Kuciak murder.

Still, the depth of the abuses uncovered by Kuciak and the ruthlessness of the nefarious forces he was investigating have shocked even the most hardened Slovaks. Kuciak was murdered alongside his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová. Slovak authorities confirmed on Monday that it was likely a contract killing.

A month after the killings, the mood in the cafés and bars of Bratislava might best be described as subdued anger. The affair remains the topic of conversation. While there's intense debate over what actually happened and why, there's broad agreement that Slovakia has reached a turning point.

"Slovakian politics will never be the same," one senior official said.

If the government fails to address the public’s ire in the coming months, Fico and his party could quickly find themselves back in the firing line. If anyone in his circle is implicated in the killings, his entire party could be in jeopardy. “They are holding on at the edge of a cliff,” said Milan Nič, an analyst on Central and Eastern Europe at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

The scenes of young Slovaks rising up to demand change has inspired liberals around the world who see the movement as a hopeful sign for democracy at a time of rising populism.

Yet, while many of the tens of thousands who have taken to the streets in recent weeks want early elections, current polls suggest a snap ballot would not result in a radically different political landscape. In fact, far from removing Smer and Fico, a new election might well give them a fresh mandate.

Indeed, the irony of Fico’s predicament is that most of those protesting his government support his pro-EU course. Young Slovakians in particular want their country to be firmly rooted in the EU and fear that it could be relegated to the fringes again like Hungary.

What they object to is the endemic sleaze that has the country in its grip.

“Corruption has become a way of life in Slovakia,” Bárdy said.

The challenge for the EU will be to nudge Slovakia’s political establishment to address the corruption while also preventing the country's leadership from pursuing the same path as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Like Slovakia, Hungary once had a robust democratic culture with a free media and civil society. In recent years, Orbán’s political machine has systematically attacked those freedoms.

In that regard, Fico’s early responses to the scandal are less than encouraging. Before resigning, he suggested that Slovak President Andrej Kiska, an old political rival, was conspiring with billionaire George Soros to undermine his government and destabilize Slovakia.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories involving Soros, a longtime advocate of democratic reform in Central Europe, aren’t uncommon in the region. Still, most mainstream politicians avoid them. Fico’s use of such tactics could be a sign that his strategy for dealing with the crisis won’t be to rebuild trust with reform, but rather to counterattack.

If Fico decides to pursue a path of confrontation with his detractors instead of reform and can rally his supporters behind him, he may yet succeed in consolidating his power.

Other members of his coalition have already gone further than Fico.

Dana Meager, deputy finance minister and a member of the conservative Slovak National Party, a junior partner in the ruling coalition, said she isn’t convinced that the mafia was behind the Kuciak murder.

A murky coalition of Western intelligence agencies together with Soros are intent on destabilizing Slovakia to create a buffer between the West and Russia, she said on the sidelines of a conference in Slovakia’s old parliament building. “Nothing is what it seems,” she insisted.

What happens next will largely depend on the street. Though there have been protests across Slovakia, they have been most intense in Bratislava, the fulcrum of the country’s political and financial life that people outside describe as a bubble.

Smer loyalists are quick to point out that the party has many supporters in Slovakia’s poorer regions, including in the east.

If Fico decides to pursue a path of confrontation with his detractors instead of reform and can rally his supporters behind him, he may yet succeed in consolidating his power. Much like Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland’s de facto leader, Fico could try to rule from behind the throne.

The question is whether Slovaks would let him get away with such a move. The protests may have waned, but the forces driving them have not.