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. 

News that Reform UK is abandoning promises to renationalize utilities such as water and energy reveals the direction of travel for Britain’s populist Right. After months of watching the slow drip of high-profile Tory defections, along with renewed promises of fiscal prudence over deficit-financed tax cuts, the U-turn on public ownership has cemented the party’s latest pivot. It is now less an insurgent force, and more the new default vehicle for the UK’s mainstream center-right.

It would always have been awkward to hear Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick arguing convincingly for positions more reminiscent of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour than their own former party. Now all of them will be spared that indignity.

But as a shapeless Reform struggles to find a permanent identity that goes beyond the “Stop the Boats” mantra, Nigel Farage’s party is losing its outsider edge. With figures like Jenrick in senior positions, Reform has moved obligingly back towards the 50-year diagnostic/prescription manual of the British Right: too much state, too much immigration — so less of both, please.

The siren voices that advised the Faragists to accept Tory ship-jumpers with open arms cited the fledgling populists’ lack of governing experience: get some credible, recognized politicians on board, and doubts about your ability to wield power will fade away. Alas, this position always misunderstood Reform’s unique appeal as an anti-political, plague-on-both-your-houses outfit — a means to burn down the whole Westminster machine. Nobody was eyeing an ascendant Farage because he appeared to be operationally competent, or an able administrator for the failing ship of state. With experienced former ministers on board, the momentum behind the party has dissipated rather than built.

It is a perennial mistake of political commentators and activists to ascribe the charge of incoherence to movements whose politics do not fit neatly on the traditional Left-Right continuum. That’s why the Conservative hierarchy resorted to accusations of “socialism” when Reform began to break out of the one-dimensional spectrum with appeals to renationalization and scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

But for the average “normie”, politics is a much more à la carte experience than it is for the rigid, partisan ideologues, with their set menu of policy opinions. For the non-obsessives, who do not define themselves ideologically but instead through broad affiliation to a diffuse “common sense” view of the world, there’s no reason why someone’s opinion on mass migration should have any bearing on their tolerance for high taxes. Nor should a person’s views on capital punishment be a certain predictor of their views on public ownership of the utilities, or on trade unions.

There were signs, once, that Farage understood this. Reform would break the mold. For the Left, the tragedy of this is that the party’s leadership is composed of libertarian, Austrian School true believers, who nevertheless draw on Boomer nostalgia for a social-democratic, postwar age of industrial statism. The Reform base for Making Britain Great Again harks back longingly to an era of economic security, with a sense of social cohesion and mass common culture that a closed, strictly national, Fordist economy and a top-down state provided.

In promising to nationalize utilities and rebuild lost manufacturing jobs, Reform was edging towards a kind of syncretic, big-tent populism that represented the genuine center ground of British politics. On the one hand was advocacy for an active state which intervened on behalf of the “man in the street” against rapacious corporations. On the other was the articulation of a robust patriotism, a desire for sustainable levels of migration, and a suspicion of cultural radicalism. It looks now like that project is over. Beneath the mask, the Conservative Party 2.0 has revealed itself.

---

Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

DespoticInroad

---