FT: Slovak election risks weakening west’s support for Ukraine

Slovakia’s upcoming election could weaken western support for Ukraine, with Russia-friendly parties expected to make a comeback in the central European country, Financial Times reports.

Successive governments in Bratislava have maintained military support for Kyiv in its defence against Russian aggression. But populist and far-right parties with varying degrees of sympathy for the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine have a good chance of joining the government that will emerge from the September 30 snap election, raising concerns about another EU and Nato member becoming less supportive of Kyiv.

Leading in the polls is Smer, the party of former prime minister Robert Fico, who resigned in 2018 following anti-corruption protests sparked by the murder of an investigative journalist and his fiancée. Smer has been tipped to win 20 per cent of the vote but would require several coalition partners to govern.

The upcoming vote stands out as “one of the very few elections where helping Ukraine is part of the campaign and where the leading party is against this help”, said Dominika Hajdu, senior analyst at Slovak think-tank Globsec. “It’s an election that can strongly influence the unity of the EU and Nato in terms of support of Ukraine.”

During his campaign, Fico has highlighted the cost for citizens of helping Ukraine fight Russia, which had been supplying most of Slovakia’s energy. He also claims to be defending national sovereignty against Nato-led pressure and led criticism of the government for delivering MiG-29 planes to Ukraine without first seeking approval from parliament.

The far-right Republika and the Slovak National party — both potential coalition partners for Fico — have adopted pro-Kremlin rhetoric and openly campaign against helping Ukraine. The two nationalist parties together are polling at about 15 per cent of voting intentions.

While Smer will probably need further partners, the polls suggest “it’s unlikely that a government could now be formed without Fico”, said Slovak analyst Milan Nič, of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

If Fico succeeds in forming a Ukraine-sceptical government, it would bolster Hungary’s pro-Russia stance within the EU and Nato. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin, has become an outlier in his support for the Russian president and has slowed down agreement on successive rounds of EU sanctions against Russia. But with Fico as an ally, Orbán could resist further restrictions against Putin’s regime indefinitely.

“You could have in Slovakia another Orbán-style government, with his kind of foreign policy, and that would have major ramifications for the European Union’s ability to continue to support Ukraine,” said Michal Šimečka, leader of the liberal Progressive Slovakia party that has been credited with 15 per cent of voting intentions.

Šimečka, a member of the European parliament, is an Oxford-educated former journalist who is also campaigning to convince younger voters not to increase Slovakia’s brain drain. “We have hundreds of thousands of people who emigrated either to study or work and a very small fraction come back,” he said.

Šimečka acknowledged that his party, which failed to get enough votes to enter parliament in the 2020 election, has gained in polls as it was not tainted by recent coalition feuding and lingering public anger over the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic. “The parties that have been part of that government have suffered as a consequence,” he said.
But pro-Russia sympathies have also risen recently.

In a regional study conducted in March by Globsec, 34 per cent of Slovak respondents identified the west as responsible for provoking Russia, the highest proportion among eight countries surveyed in central and eastern Europe.

Only four of the nine parties expected to get into parliament still support sanctions against Russia, according to a study conducted by news website Euractiv. Smer has kept an ambivalent position on sanctions, arguing that it wanted to “evaluate their efficiency” before deciding whether to extend them.
Slovakia’s campaign should serve as a warning about disinformation within the EU, following what caretaker prime minister Ľudovít Ódor called “a huge amount of propaganda coming from Russian sources.”

Russia has helped spread fake news within Slovakia, but local politicians had already fuelled public distrust in state institutions, including during a 2021 pandemic scandal that forced then prime minister Igor Matovič to resign after secretly buying vaccines from Russia.

Slovakia’s problems would remain “as long as disinformation is also being spread by our own public officials and elected politicians”, said Erik Szedely, of public affairs consultancy Fipra.