Former Prime Minister Robert Fico’s left-wing Smer-SD party won Saturday’s election in NATO member Slovakia after pledging to stop sending weapons to Ukraine, block Kiev’s possible NATO membership and oppose sanctions imposed on Russia, notes political.
Robert Fico, the leader of the populist Smer-SD party in SlovakiaPhoto: Petr David Josek / AP / Profimedia
With 98% of the ballots counted in this tiny country of just 5.5 million inhabitants, Smer-SD won 23.4% of the vote, edging out the liberal, pro-Western Progressive Slovakia by almost seven percentage points and almost 200,000 votes.
The winner of the election has the first chance to form a majority in the 150-seat parliament.
Fico’s campaign has sparked international disquiet amid fears that he will move Slovakia into the anti-Kiev camp alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Fico displays a pro-Moscow orientation, pledging to end arms supplies to Kiev and opposing sanctions, even as Russian President Vladimir Putin shows no signs of backing down from the war he started in 2022.
Tiny Slovakia has proven one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters since the start of the Russian invasion last year, approving numerous military aid to Kiev. If we were to refer to the value of aid packages in relation to the population, then Slovakia would be among the most important partners of Ukraine.
Among other things, the Bratislava government announced in March this year that it would send fighter jets to Kiev, modernized MiG-29 models. Slovakia thus became only the second country to commit to sending military aircraft to Ukraine, with Bratislava’s announcement coming just a day after Warsaw’s.
Fico’s pivot for a coalition
Despite the deep polarization in Slovakia, Fico is in a favorable position to return to power with the support of Hlas (Vocea), a social democratic party that broke away from Smer-SD, which came in third with 15 % of votes.
Hlas is led by Peter Pellegrini, who took over from Fico as Slovakia’s leader in 2018 during the political crisis following the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak.
Following Smer-SD’s defeat in the 2020 elections, Pellegrini turned his back on the party and Fico to form Hlas with 10 MPs who defected from Smed-SD.
In February, Pellegrini said that Fico is “a politician from the past” and one who “can no longer offer Slovakia any hope or vision for the 21st century”.
Bitter taste for the leader of Progressive Slovakia
“This was a trauma for all of us,” Fico said at a political rally in his hometown of Topoľčany on August 30. “We have two parties here with the same social program, which come from the same roots in Smer-SD and which I know. So I believe that the basis for a successful, stable and sovereign, socially oriented government should be the cooperation between Smer-SD and Hlas.”
After the election result was announced at 4 o’clock on Sunday morning, Pellegrini said that he expected to receive an offer of cooperation from Fico and that “nothing prevents the creation of such a coalition”, even if having “two former prime -ministers in the same government is not an optimal solution”.
Another potential coalition partner for Fico could be the Slovak National Party (SNS), which got 5.7% support. SNS teamed up with Smer-SD in government between 2006-2010 and 2016-2020. SNS leader Andrej Danko said there was hope that the country’s next government would be “pro-nation, pro-social”.
Based on the election results, the three parties would control 81 seats in the legislature, which means a majority.
The final result could leave Michal Šimečka, the leader of Progressive Slovakia, with a bitter taste.
The first exit polls after polls closed on Saturday evening had given the PS a small lead over Smer-SD, encouraging the former journalist, Oxford doctor and member of the European Parliament to believe he could win his first term by prime minister.
Pro-Russian rhetoric
Saturday’s vote was seen as crucial for Slovakia’s future, not only because of Fico’s promises to cut aid to Ukraine, but also more generally because of his pro-Moscow sympathies in a NATO member country.
For example, Fico told his audience in Topoľčany in August that “the war in Ukraine did not start a year ago, but in 2014, when Ukrainian Nazis and fascists started killing Russian citizens in Donbas and Luhansk.”
Fico also praised the Soviet Union for allegedly liberating the Czech and Slovak territories from Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. “For God’s sake, they freed us, we should show some respect,” he urged his countrymen.
“We must tell the whole world that freedom came from the East, war always comes from the West,” he added.
“It was unequivocally a victory of the Red Army, and Smer-SD will remember this history every day, every hour, every second,” Fico told his supporters at the rally in August.
Fico takes inspiration from Orban
Rastislav Kačer, a career diplomat and former Slovak foreign minister, believes the Hungarian prime minister is a Robert Fico model, using Russia’s rhetoric to get votes, even if he might not be pro-Moscow.
“Mr. Fico finds great inspiration in Orbán’s style of government, which is Putin’s model of politics,” Kačer said. “He may not even have the intention of doing everything he says. He still he probably thinks he can fool everyone again by stoking anti-Western populist sentiment at home, feigning rebellious courage against the EU and NATO – and then acting as if nothing happened.”
Robert Fico accused Soros of bringing down his government
Fico, a textbook populist, was the country’s prime minister from 2006 to 2010 and then again from 2012 to 2018, during which he railed against the West to his domestic electorate, but was still careful not to upset Europe’s international order.
But what happened next shook Slovakia to its foundations.
Ján Kuciak, a young investigative journalist investigating suspected corruption in Fico’s government, regarding EU subsidies, but also the Italian mafia, was assassinated in February 2018 along with his fiancee, Martina Kušnírova.
Slovakia saw the biggest protests since the Velvet Revolution that led to the fall of communism, with tens of thousands of Slovaks taking to the streets for months.
Fico eventually relented and resigned, but not before accusing US billionaire George Soros of funding the protests against his government.
The following year, Zuzana Čaputová, a former lawyer and environmental activist, won the presidential election and a few months later she presided over the formation of a reformist government.
Shortly after, however, the COVID-19 pandemic and the turbulence brought by it began. Slovakia has since had four prime ministers, with successive governing coalitions falling apart amid disagreements over measures to combat the pandemic, high inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.
The most recent government, led by former prime minister Eduard Heger, fell last December following a no-confidence motion against him. He served as interim until June, when he asked the president to remove him from office.
