Political Communication of Parliamentary Party Leaders on Facebook after the 2023 Elections until the Attempted Assassination of the Prime Minister

Political communication in the Slovak political space has its own specifics, but it follows the trend of many democracies towards coarser vocabulary, vulgarisation, and escalation of political conflict. The aim of this study is to identify the messages that the leaders of the elected parliamentary parties addressed to the public via Facebook in the period after the parliamentary elections. The period is bounded by the assassination attempt on the Prime Minister Róbert Fico in May 2024. Qualitative research using grounded theory is the collection of data to reach a theoretical concept. We used NVivo qualitative software to code the data, in our case messages public on FB profiles of individual party leaders. Grounded theory is often used in political communication and helps us to create a theoretical concept. There are 6 main Themes that emerged as a result of political communication after parliamentary elections: Domestic Policies, Foreign Policies, Criticism of the Government/Opposition, Criticism of Others, Presidential Election and Positive Messages. Negative campaigning significantly influences affective polarization. Based on an analysis of 632 Facebook posts by leaders of Slovak parliamentary parties, we conclude that negative campaigning constitutes the largest share of all analyzed posts. Combined with a strong presence of anger, aggression, insults, and vulgarity, political campaigning via Facebook contributed to an increasingly polarized atmosphere, which culminated in the 2024 assassination attempt on Prime Minister Fico.