A Former Communist Wins Big in Slovakia as More Cracks Appear in European Support for Ukraine

Going, going, gone with the October wind? Not quite, but as elections in Slovakia that saw a pro-Russia leader coast to power just demonstrated, European support for Ukraine is slipping with possibly even bigger Continental challenges to come. On Saturday, Slovakia’s leftist former prime minister Robert Fico, branded by his many early detractors as populist, beat his progressive rival in a parliamentary election after campaigning to end military aid to Ukraine. He will need to win over allies to form the next government, but a solid victory at the polls signals that it will not be particularly difficult to do so. A government led by Mr. Fico and his Direction party, or Smer party, will see NATO member Slovakia tilting politically away from Brussels and toward Budapest in challenging the European Union’s consensus on support for Ukraine, just as the bloc looks to maintain unity in opposing Russia’s invasion. The Progressive Slovakia party, which has advocated for maintaining Slovakia’s solid backing of Ukraine, had been expected to make headway in urban voting districts, but Smer easily closed it out. Mr. Fico is no brash newcomer. The 59-year-old’s political career began in Czechoslovakia’s Communist party. He has already twice served as Slovakia’s prime minister. His pledge to stop military aid to Ukraine and push for negotiations with Moscow as well as criticism of sanctions targeting Russia put him into loose alignment with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Last week, Mr. Orbán rendezvoused with Marine Le Pen, leader of the parliamentary group of the French National Rally. Ms. Le Pen has also opposed sanctions against Russia, maintaining that they harm French consumers and represent the EU’s mistakes because Russia simply pivoted to trading partners outside Europe. In addition to long-standing challenges to that unity from Budapest, compounded by the news from Bratislava, there have been recent disruptions from Poland, which shares long borders with both Slovakia and Ukraine. Last month amid a festering trade dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said that Poland would cease sending arms to Ukraine. Poland’s taking in an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 has only exacerbated domestic pressures that have eroded some of the support for Ukraine that less than a year ago was taken for granted.It is just such kinds of tensions that the Kremlin relishes. There is also evidence that, at least with respect to Slovakia, it is behind some of them. Just in time for Saturday’s elections, a video resurfaced of a Russian diplomat attempting to recruit a Slovak spy and handing him packets of cash in an unspecified wooded area. Slovakia’s interior ministry has stated that there are 100 to 200 Slovaks working directly or indirectly for Russian agents.Many Slovaks harbor sympathy for Russia, some of it stemming from gratitude for the Red Army’s liberation of the country at the end of World War II. Not surprisingly, pro-Moscow propaganda is now widespread in the Slovak media.Mr. Fico, for his part, told reporters last month that no amount of Western weapons going to Ukraine would change the course of the war and that “it’s naive to think that Russia would ever abandon the territory it controls” in Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.As a small nation of just over 5.5 million, is it not likely that Slovakia will rock the boat much on its own. But look for more turbulence to come in the heart of Europe. In Poland, where parliamentary elections are slated for October 15, priorities right now are more focused on the future of Poland, less on its neighbors to the east. The leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczyński, has already lambasted Donald Tusk, head of the Civic Platform opposition party, as a “pest” and “enemy of Poland.” Germans remain divided over ongoing aid to Ukraine. A poll earlier this year found that 84 percent of supporters of the ascendant Alternative für Deutschland party opposed sending German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. The AfD is not only the object of much media fascination, given Germany’s fascist proclivities in the past, but is now the second strongest party in Germany. Marrying Germany’s far right and far left is a Kremlin goal, as The Washington Post has reported. That objective may be a long way off, but from Berlin to Bratislava, Europe as a whole looks to be increasingly distracted. So for that matter so does Washington, where the future of a multi-billion dollar Ukraine security assistance package sought by the Biden administration still hangs in the balance. On Saturday, House Speaker McCarthy omitted additional Ukraine aid from a measure to keep the federal government running until November 17. In any event, the Pentagon likely has sufficient drawn-down money to last through the end of the year. By then, however, the fine lines emerging in Europe’s complex political map could start turning into some pesky wrinkles — ones that only a strongman like Vladimir Putin is likely to find pretty.

A Former Communist Wins Big in Slovakia as More Cracks Appear in European Support for Ukraine

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