A tense election campaign in which politicians have exchanged physical blows is coming to a head in Slovakia, where the return of an anti-Ukraine former prime minister could be thwarted by a liberal outsider enjoying a late surge in support.
Ex-prime minister Robert Fico, who wants to end his country’s support for Ukraine, is hoping to benefit from the political paralysis in the central European nation to stage a stunning return to power after Saturday’s snap election. His victory would be seen as further evidence of fraying western support for Kyiv, following a threat by Poland to stop sending weapons to Ukraine and a fight in the US Congress over continued financial support.
Yet the voter demands for a return to a strong and stable government that are propelling Fico are also helping his main rival, Michal Šimečka, whose party stayed out of the recent political chaos after failing to enter parliament in the last election.
Fico’s nominally centre-left Smer party is jostling for first place with Šimečka’s liberal Progressive Slovakia party, according to the latest opinion polls, which give each party about 20 per cent of voting intentions.
Šimečka, a former journalist, including briefly for the Financial Times, and now a member of the European parliament, is warning that Fico would ally with Hungary’s leader Viktor Orbán to halt western efforts to help Ukraine. “You could have another Orbán-style government in Slovakia, with its kind of foreign policy, and that would have major ramifications for the EU’s ability to continue to support Ukraine,” he said in an interview earlier this month.
Šimečka is pledging to improve Slovakia’s health and education systems, reverse a brain drain that has hurt its economy and fast-track the green transition. He could co-operate with the Hlas party of Fico’s arch-rival Peter Pellegrini, which has about 10 per cent of voting intentions, but would still face a struggle to find other smaller parties to form a solid governing coalition.
Whichever party scores the most votes on Saturday, Slovakia’s political fragmentation means the election is likely to be followed by complicated negotiations. Since May Slovakia has been run by a technocratic government, appointed by President Zuzana Čaputová to help stabilise the country and end the internal feuding among the previous incumbents, which was exacerbated by a mismanaged Covid-19 pandemic.
The coalition talks will also depend on how many parties make it to the negotiating table. The latest polls show four of the nine main parties hovering around the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament.
Slovakia’s election campaign has been toxic, featuring insults and outlandish behaviour by several candidates.
Two weeks ago former prime minister Igor Matovič from the conservative Olano party crashed a news conference organised by Smer, driving a pick-up truck that he decorated with an anti-Mafia slogan. He then used the loudspeakers mounted on his vehicle to launch a tirade against Robert Kaliňák, Fico’s former interior minister, who was on the podium. An incensed Kaliňák confronted Matovič in his pick-up and they ended up in a fist-fight.
Fico has built his comeback on the same public distrust in politicians and institutions that forced him to resign in 2018 amid mass street protests sparked by the killing of a journalist, who was investigating corruption, and his fiancée. He has benefited from infighting between rivals who had promised to clean up politics and instead mishandled the pandemic. Matovič was forced to resign as prime minister in 2021 for secretly buying Covid vaccines from Russia.
Another former prime minister who could thwart Fico’s comeback is his former protégé Pellegrini, who succeeded him in office. Pellegrini then left Smer to form Hlas.
“What has motivated Fico’s comeback is that he wants revenge against Pellegrini and against the journalists, NGOs, police investigators and public prosecutors who have been leading corruption cases against him and his people,” said Peter Bárdy, chief editor of online publication Aktuality and author of a new book about Fico.
Fico has helped shape Slovak politics for two decades, but he also has a record of unpredictable policymaking and political shape-shifting after coming to office.
One of those moments came in 2006, when Fico promised voters that he would keep Slovakia out of the euro. His campaign deployed posters with people exposing half-covered backsides to warn that the single currency would return Slovakia to poverty.
But after Fico won, investors sent the Slovak koruna plunging, forcing him to make a U-turn and embrace his country’s accession to the eurozone. “He had campaigned on an anti-euro platform but it was Fico’s finance minister who then pushed Slovakia towards euro adoption,” recalled Vladimír Vaňo, chief economist of think-tank Globsec. “I think that when campaign slogans clash with reality, Fico can be both very cynical and pragmatic.”
Fico’s overt anti-Ukraine campaigning has raised alarm bells in Brussels and Washington. But any attempt by Fico to change tack in foreign policy could be strongly curtailed by the need to accommodate coalition partners — unlike Orbán in Hungary, whose party enjoys a parliamentary majority and who stands out as Russia’s clearest backer within the EU.
“Fico will try to show his muscles, but he will not be as free to decide things as Orbán,” said Tomáš Strážay, director of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, a think-tank.
Fico is also backed by powerful businessmen who do not share his Ukraine agenda, according to Milan Nič, senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
“The big businesses around Fico want to be part of the reconstruction of Ukraine,” he said.
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