Two years ago, when Robert Fico cobbled together an unlikely coalition with a xenophobe and a former authoritarian, his election victory was greeted with a shudder by the rest of Europe and by fear from businesspeople and economists, who worried he would junk the reforms that had made Slovakia a star performer.

Today, Mr Fico is at the helm of a country enjoying the fastest growth in Europe, his Smer party is no longer shunned in the European parliament, he is by far the country’s most popular politician, and Slovakia is months away from becoming the second ex-communist country to adopt the euro, after Slovenia.