Is a picture of Ivan Korcok, a pro-Western Slovak presidential candidate defeated by Peter Pellegrini in the April 6, 2024 runoff vote in Slovakia, holding on to George Soros' back, authentic? No, that's not true: The photo has been digitally altered. The original image was taken from Alexander Soros' social media account and shows him with his father, George Soros, not Korcok.
The image appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on March 26, 2024, predating the second round of the presidential vote in Slovakia. It shows a series of snapshots of Korcok, next to Petr Kolar, a Czech former diplomat and close advisor to Czech President Petr Pavel, then Korcok with former U.S. Secretary of State and diplomat Madeleine Albright, and a doctored image of Korcok and George Soros. The video's caption, translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff, reads, "How will it end? In the first round of the presidential election, former Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok won. What will the second round be like? The comments below the video include (as translated):
it's Soros the evil lichen.
...same thinking, same puppets of the rich and powerful behind the scenes, who give them orders...
how's it gonna turn out? just like in CR (the Czech Republic). America, GB (Great Britain) and France will dictate who will be the president of the Slovak Republic, not the Slovaks, because it is all a scam on us ordinary people
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Monday, April 8 07:22:23 2024 UTC)
The image above, which is used in the TikTok video, is a manipulated version of the picture that was originally posted by Alexander Soros on his Instagram account in 2023, with a caption explaining it was taken ahead of the Munich Security conference, which took place from February 17, 2023, to February 19, 2023. The original social media post is shown below (archived here).
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Monday, April 8 07:22:23 2024 UTC)
Korcok is a former Slovak foreign minister with liberal and pro-Western views who opposed the pro-Russian stance of current Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico (archived here). Korcok was defeated by Fico's ally Peter Pellegrini in the second round of the presidential election on April 6, 2024 (archived here). During the campaign, Korcok faced accusations that he was a U.S. agent, a claim debunked by Lead Stories here, or that he was being paid by George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish-American billionaire, a claim Korcok himself mentioned as a joke at the pre-election meeting in Bratislava in March 2024 (archived here).
A search conducted on April 9, 2024, for the phrase "Korčoka platí Soros" (archived here), translated by Lead Stories staff as "Korcok is paid by Soros" - a recurrent claim Korcok faced during the election campaign -, using Google News' index of thousands of credible news sites, did not reveal any factual reports that would support an alleged connection between Korcok and Soros.
Korcok has already been falsely accused of attending a meeting in New York in 2017 between Slovakia's then-president Andrej Kiska and George Soros in the past (archived here). Korcok denied that he took part in the meeting here and here on his Facebook account (archived here and here). In August 2022, Korcok wrote on his Facebook account that he met with George Soros' son Alexander, the then vice-president of the Open Society Foundations, at the European Forum in Alpbach, Austria, saying that he wanted to "openly inform" about his meeting to prevent any development of conspiracy theories (archived here). The Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky was also present at the meeting.
Soros, who as a philanthropist has been actively involved in the transition of post-communist countries to capitalism since 1989, has become a central figure in many disinformation campaigns that portray him as a puppet master controlling the global economy and world leaders (archived here).
In Central and Eastern Europe, these theories have been used in particular by the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, and of Slovakia, Robert Fico (archived here). In 2015, Viktor Orban accused Soros of fueling the wave of refugees by inviting them to the country through the ring of his NGOs (archived here). Robert Fico also accused Soros of interfering in Slovakia's internal politics in 2018 (archived here).
Peter Pellegrini, who defeated Korcok and is now the new President of Slovakia, is aligned with Fico's government, unlike Korcok, who holds pro-Western and more liberal views (archived here).
During the electoral campaign, Korcok was targeted on social media (archived here) for his association with Madeleine Albright, a former U.S. Secretary of State, and a diplomat, born in Prague, who supported NATO's bombing of Serbian territory in 1999 (archived here). Claims about Albright, who is often attacked by pro-Russian and anti-government trolls, will not be addressed in this fact check.
