“I am knocking on the door of the Ministry of Finance so that the institutions do not have to be cancelled,” declared the SNS nominee, who arrived at the committee together with her key colleague Lukáš Machala.
At the committee meeting, both defended extensive personnel changes in the management of contribution organizations and described the cuts as a consequence of “other priorities”, especially plans for a central depository and investment in the buildings of the Slovak National Museum.
According to Machala, the ministry thus needed to “save” approximately ten million euros (roughly 243 million crowns) to cover the debt from previous years. However, these cuts have caused existential problems for more than twenty institutions – from the State Science Library in Košice, which did not buy a single book this year, to the Slovak Philharmonic, where the budget is missing over a million euros. “That’s how we evaluated it,” Machala said, adding that it was a collective decision.
For Šimkovičová and into the fire?
The tense atmosphere at the committee was well captured by the speech of Zuzana Ťapáková, director general of the Slovak National Theatre, who – just like the head of the Slovak National Gallery Juraj Králik – was appointed by Šimkovičová to the position.
Instead of asking the minister, Ťapáková turned to her colleagues and asked which of the directors “went to sue” that there was a meeting of the committee at all. She added that a capable manager should be able to negotiate money even in difficult times and that accusations of political interference in the SND program are “pure lies”.
Her words were opposed by the director of the Music Center, Igor Valentovič, who agrees to initiate the meeting and has warned for a long time that without a change in the ministry’s approach, there is a risk of canceling festivals, jeopardizing the Culture for Schools project and the activities of the Slovak Youth Orchestra.
The meeting was also devoted to the recent report of the Supreme Audit Office, which described the systemic failures of the state in the restoration of Krásná Hůrka, Spiš Castle and the Slovak National Gallery, as well as in the management of these projects by the Ministry of Culture.
While the SAO emphasized that it was a pre-planned inspection, the minister described the results as proof that the culture had been “a mess for decades”, which she is now trying to clean up. She complained that “whatever we do is absolutely wrong”, and she also returned to the boycott of STVR by some artists who, according to her, go on television in the morning and in the afternoon to the Sun awards in the network to criticize “the hand that pays them”.
