Two months ago, in these pages, I predicted that Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party would win the Slovakian elections and everybody would start worrying about what this meant for Ukraine. Why do I mention this now? Because what I predicted happened – and while you may think it rather bad form of me to remind you of my extraordinary insight, the thing is I feel a little embittered that I am not given the respect I am due as an oracle. Perhaps only an oracle on Slovakian politics, but still. It is only a week since the Financial Times predicted, with great confidence, that Michal Simecka’s ‘Progressive Slovakia’ would win the poll. Whoever wrote that piece clearly hadn’t read my analysis, or perhaps had and didn’t take it seriously. This is what annoys me. I would like to be known as the foremost journalistic expert on Slovakian affairs in the UK and perhaps offered a chair at a university. But when I go to universities I am not offered a chair, I am more frequently offered the door.
The liberals will argue that populist parties play to the ‘baser instincts’ of the electorate, tapping into their fears
Anyway, the worries have begun that Putin has a foothold in the West, a suspicion not helped by Fico’s assertion that the war in Ukraine was begun by ‘Ukrainian Nazis and fascists’. His party’s lack of sympathy for Ukraine comes partly from a pan-Slavism which has always placed the Russkis at the pinnacle, plus the vestigial tail of Bolshevism wagging inside their minds (Fico is a former member of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia) as well as a healthy distrust of the USA and the European Union.
The only upshot, so far as Ukraine is concerned, is that Slovakia might get its MIGs back but otherwise Kyiv will not be hugely discommoded.
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