Slovakia: Will the new populist leader abandon Ukraine?
Slovakia, a pro-Western stalwart, will now “turn its rudder toward the east,” said Zola Mikes in Aktuality (Slovakia). The pro-Russia, leftist-populist Smer party won parliamentary elections this week, compelling our progressive president, Zuzana Caputova, to give its leader Robert Fico—who has viciously attacked her as an American puppet—the first chance at forming a coalition to become the country’s next prime minister. Fico, 59, is a former communist who’s been prime minister twice before, from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2012 to 2018, when he was forced to step down following the murder of a journalist who was investigating his alleged mafia ties. During his nasty, mudslinging electoral campaign, Fico called Ukraine “the perpetrator,” not the victim, of the war with Russia and even threatened to withdraw Slovakia from NATO. “Until now, we have been a dependable partner for both the U.S. and the European Union.” But “with Fico’s victory, all that is over.”
Because Smer only won 23 percent of the vote, Fico must seek partners to govern, said Tom Nicholson in Politico.eu (Belgium). The most obvious picks are the social-democratic Hlas—formed in 2020 by Smer moderates fed up with Fico’s burgeoning illiberalism and corruption—and the hard-right Slovak National Party. That may seem an odd combination, but Smer’s populism makes it more alt-right than traditionally leftist. Under Fico, Slovakia is likely to transform into an echo of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and align loosely with Russia. Fico won’t send Ukraine any more weapons, because he claims the war is the fault of “Ukrainian Nazis and fascists” who are “murdering Russian citizens.” Fortunately, said Defense Express (Ukraine) in an editorial, his stance won’t hurt Ukraine as much as you might think. Slovakia has already given us all the military hardware it could possibly spare, from helicopters to missiles to minesweepers. It sent us “a significant number of Soviet-style weapons” a few years after Russia gobbled up Crimea; in 2022, it became the first country to send us a “full-fledged air defense system,” and this year, along with Poland, it gave us MiG-29 fighter jets. Even the most proUkrainian of Slovak politicians now say that Slovakia’s military resources are “exhausted,” and we don’t blame them. We’re grateful for what we got.
For the rest of Europe, Fico’s return is dispiriting, said Viktoria Grossmann in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). In his earlier stints as prime minister, he brought Slovakia to the brink of state capture, “permeated by a corrupt network” that served only the powerful. Lacking any guiding principle but the lust for “power and impunity,” he panders to voters by railing against the scapegoat du jour, whether Covid vaccines or the EU. He despises a laundry list of people—refugees, LGBTQ people, human rights activists, and journalists—and he has made “personal attacks and a vulgar way of speaking” the new norm in politics. The one bright spot for the EU is that Fico may be so busy enriching his cronies that he’ll “let things slide at the international level.” Still, if Slovakia does become another authoritarian, illiberal Hungary, Europe will have no choice but to punish it.