The shooting of the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, has dramatised the increasingly angry and polarised landscape of European politics. With just weeks to go before the European parliament elections, it is time to step back from the brink.

This eruption of violence in the midst of the campaign is so shocking that it may, at best, have a chastening effect, softening the venomous tone of political discourse by reminding democracies old and new of what they stand to lose.

More likely, it will aggravate polarisation and perhaps serve as a “Reichstag fire” moment for Slovakia’s national populist government, leading to a more repressive regime in Bratislava and beyond.

As the 59-year-old Fico lay fighting for his life, the Slovakian interior minister, Matúš Šutaj Eštok, declared “we are on the verge of civil war” and warned politicians against inflaming a dangerous situation. But other ministers swiftly seized on the attack to justify Fico’s plans to crack down on the media and civil society and turn the independent public broadcaster into a government mouthpiece.

Fico’s Eurosceptic authoritarian ally, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, drew 1.2m views and a torrent of anti-globalist, anti-EU comments when he tweeted his sympathy for the Slovakian leader after the attack.

We know little about the 71-year-old gunman or his motives so far. Šutaj Eštok called him a “lone wolf”. But social media conspiracy theorists were quick to blame Europe’s liberal elites for creating an environment of hate against Fico.

It comes against a backdrop of growing low-level political violence and threats against candidates, mayors and elected officials that have led some to abandon politics. Suspected far-right thugs beat up a Social Democratic MEP candidate in eastern Germany last month, putting him in hospital, and several Greens activists have also been attacked. French mayors quit last........

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