Already made extremely complicated by the blockages of the Hungarian nationalist Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, the exercise – pursuing a united European policy on the war in Ukraine – risks becoming almost impossible after the results of the Slovak legislative elections organized on Saturday September 30. According to the quasi-final results announced on Sunday October 1, the national-populist party Smer (“Direction”) came in first with nearly 23% of the votes. Its leader, Robert Fico, is in a strong position to become prime minister again after having already held this position twice between 2006 and 2018.
Aged 59, Mr. Fico ran his entire campaign promising to align the foreign policy of this Central European country of 5.5 million inhabitants with that of neighboring Hungary. His program thus speaks of “reject military aid to Ukraine” because she “only prolongs the conflict”, to oppose “sanctions which hurt Europe more than Russia” or “normalize relations” with Moscow. Defending himself to be “pro-Russian”the candidate assures that he wants Slovakia to remain a member of the European Union and NATO, but his probable return to power will put an end to the policy of the outgoing pro-Western government which had gone so far as to give the Mig-29s of the Slovak army to Ukraine.
Corruption
With its small size, Slovakia is certainly a neighbor and an ally of relative importance compared to Poland and Romania, but Mr. Fico could allow Hungary to emerge from its isolation within the Visegrad group (which includes also Czechia and Poland) and thus unite two states to pursue an anti-Kiev veto policy at the European Council table. In Budapest, Mr. Orban’s propagandists openly celebrated this ally’s victory. The winner had still not spoken on Sunday morning, but, to form a majority, Mr. Fico will have to obtain the support of the 27 elected officials of the social-democratic party Hlas, created by dissidents from Smer with whom he maintains complicated relations .
Faced with its opponent, the centrist and pro-Western “Progressive Slovakia” party did not give up on gaining power even if it only obtained a little less than 18% of the votes. “We will do everything so that Robert Fico does not reign in Slovakia”declared Sunday morning its leader, Michal Simecka, who spent his entire campaign calling on voters to avoid ” the danger “ Fico. Driven from power by the streets in 2018 after the assassination of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, who opened the eyes of Slovaks to the infiltration of the mafia in their country, the former prime minister nevertheless managed to make a comeback in force by assimilating the dozens of convictions for corruption that have occurred in recent years in his entourage to “political persecution”.
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