- By Rob Cameron
- BBC News, Brno
1 hour ago
Image source: Getty Images
image description,
Robert Fico’s populist SMER party is currently on track to win Saturday’s parliamentary elections in Slovakia
Following the collapse of the former centre-right government, Slovaks will vote in early elections this weekend.
The frontrunner in most polls is Robert Fico’s populist SMER party, which has promised an immediate end to Slovak military support for Ukraine.
Fico was forced to resign as prime minister following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak in 2018.
“If SMER comes into government, we will not send a single round of ammunition to Ukraine,” he recently told his supporters.
The threat has set alarm bells ringing in Western capitals as they scan the façade of NATO-EU unity for signs of cracks. It echoes the rhetoric of Slovakia’s neighbor and NATO colleague Hungary, which says only diplomacy can ensure peace.
But for some, Fico’s threat is a diversionary tactic.
Bratislava has been a loyal and steadfast ally, supplying Kiev with surface-to-air missiles and helicopters and even donating its entire fleet of decommissioned MiG-29 fighter jets.
However, there isn’t much left to give.
“The cupboard is empty,” a Western official told the BBC.
Image source: Getty Images
image description,
Ukraine has taken over the entire Slovak MiG-29 fleet
What remains are trade deals for heavy weapons, including self-propelled howitzers ordered by Ukraine and its Western partners.
The majority of the manufacturers are state-owned defense companies, and a Fico government could – theoretically – intervene.
But these contracts create jobs for Slovaks and revenue for the Slovak state. Fico, the officer reasoned, probably wouldn’t endanger them.
SMER did not respond to interview requests. But party MP Lubos Blaha spoke to the BBC this summer, using language that sounded as if it had been written in Moscow, not Bratislava.
“We must end this war – at all costs,” said Blaha.
“I can understand that Ukrainians would not be happy if they lost Donbass or Crimea, for example. But we still have to be realistic,” Blaha said, describing the conflict as a “proxy war of the United States against Russia.” on Ukrainian soil.”
Meanwhile, Robert Fico told a recent rally that the war began in 2014 when “Ukrainian Nazis and fascists began murdering the Russian population in Donbass.”
Head-to-head with SMER is Progressive Slovakia, a liberal, pro-Western party that promises to maintain military aid to Ukraine.
image description,
Tomas Vasalek fears that Robert Fico will follow the example of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban
“The late one [Czechoslovak-born US secretary of state] “Madeleine Albright famously called us the black hole of Europe and kicked Slovakia off the NATO accession path,” the party’s deputy leader, Tomas Valasek, a former NATO ambassador, told me, referring to the dark, authoritarian 1990s Years under Vladimir Meciar.
“I suspect that this will broadly be the future if ex-Prime Minister Fico is re-elected,” he said, adding that the SMER leader was guided by Viktor Orban’s game plan.
We spoke across the border in the Czech city of Brno. Valasek was there to rally support among Slovak university students, tens of thousands of whom will be heading home to vote this weekend – some of them on two special trains provided free by Slovak NGOs.
Every year, around 17% of Slovak high school graduates leave their country to study at universities abroad. The OECD average is 2%. They are leaving, he said, because of disillusionment with poor higher education and health care, a lack of tolerance – particularly outside the capital – and a general sense of dissatisfaction.
More than half never come back.
image description,
The election in Slovakia is raising concerns in the West and in NATO about what it means for the coalition supporting Ukraine
Progressive Slovakia offers the vision of an open, tolerant and cosmopolitan society. SMER dismisses this vision as “liberal fascism” and instead advocates for stability, order and social security.
“In recent weeks, several foreign diplomats have asked me: Don’t you cry too soon?” said Beata Balogova, editor-in-chief of the daily SME.
Balogova pushed back against the optimistic notion that once in office, the populist Fico will – as he has done in the past – give way to the pragmatist Fico, especially given the high demands of Slovak coalition building.
“That’s a completely false assumption,” she told me.
“Right now Robert Fico doesn’t have a better version of himself. Right now he has to continue to feed his electorate. For this electorate, you have to beat someone every day. Because once you have told them that there is a migration threat, there is a threat from the LGBT community and the liberals – you have to keep fighting them.”
Neither SMER nor Progressive Slovakia is expected to win significantly more than 20%, and polls suggest that up to ten parties could be represented in the new parliament. Forming a coalition could be chaotic.
Image source: Getty Images
image description,
Polls suggest up to ten parties could be represented in Slovakia’s new parliament, so forming a coalition could be complex
Back in Bratislava I boarded a pleasure cruise on the Danube. Our diesel boat chugged bravely upstream toward Vienna and west before making a slow 180-degree turn to the east. Downriver was Budapest, home of Mr. Fico’s apparent political mentor.
“Slovakia has been drifting for quite some time,” said my riverboat companion Alena Kudzko, an analyst at the Bratislava-based think tank Globsec.
“What unites Slovaks is that they believe their country should be a bridge between East and West,” she said.
“That sounds like a nice idea, but it’s not really feasible in reality. When a large country is at war on its borders, it is difficult to be a bridge.”
In March, Kudzko and her colleagues released a poll showing that only 40% of Slovaks believed Russia was responsible for the war in Ukraine. Half saw the United States as a security threat. SMER’s rhetoric seems to be falling on fertile ground.
It is not for nothing that some fear that Robert Fico could pull Slovakia back into Moscow’s sphere of influence.