Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

At the weekend, a by-election in the Division of Farrer in New South Wales produced a striking political upset. In a seat that had been held by the Liberal Party or its Coalition partner the Nationals at every election since 1949, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, a party frequently compared to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, stormed to victory.

The result comes barely a year after the 2025 general election, in which the Liberals secured just 28 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives — the lowest tally in the party’s history. Following this by-election defeat, that number now stands at 27.

The seat of Farrer was vacated by former Liberal leader and prominent moderate Sussan Ley. During her leadership, the party backed rushed “hate speech” legislation introduced after the Bondi massacre, despite initial resistance. As I argued for UnHerd in January, these laws expanded state control over ordinary Australians, particularly by restricting free speech. By the time Ley lost the leadership to Angus Taylor, the Liberals had sunk to record-low polling of 18%.

Since Tony Abbott was removed as prime minister in 2015, the Liberal Party has, like its Conservative counterparts in the UK, increasingly functioned as a center-right party in name only. It has embraced a mix of big spending, expanded government and technocratic managerialism, most clearly seen in its strong support for stringent Covid-era lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It has also adopted Net Zero commitments, despite earlier campaigning against them.

This pivot to the Left has allowed One Nation to outflank the Liberals on the Right. The party has tapped into concerns about immigration, energy, industry, jobs, agriculture, housing, Islamic extremism and the cost of living. Pollsters say voters have never been so disillusioned, negative and lacking in hope for the future.

Could One Nation launch a Reform-style insurgency in Australia? Since the 2025 election, Hanson’s party has consistently polled neck and neck with the Liberals, often in the high 20s, and has now begun translating that polling strength into electoral gains. The win in Farrer follows on from the election in South Australia in March, where One Nation won four seats in the state’s upper and lower houses of parliament, respectively.

Even so, like Reform, One Nation does not currently have the votes to win a general election outright. The more probable scenario is that the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation form a conservative coalition to oust Labor from power. But the scale of the Farrer by-election loss cannot be overstated. It was, after all, in this Division that Sir Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1944 as a “chance to give a means of expression to the deepest feelings to hundreds of thousands of Australians who are frustrated by the present and who are seriously alarmed about the future” — those he called the “forgotten people”.

The Farrer result suggests that those forgotten people have now crossed the Rubicon to One Nation.