Slovakia risks following in the footsteps of Orban’s Hungary

With an early election just six months away, the most pressing question facing Slovak politics is whether the country is about to turn down the path of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. The decision might come down to just one individual: former prime minister Peter Pellegrini.

A lot is pointing in direction of Orbánism. With the collapse of a ramshackle, though staunchly pro-Western and pro-Ukrainian, coalition of broadly centre-right parties, the promise of the putative leader of the opposition and Pellegrini’s predecessor in office, Robert Fico, to form a government ‘as stable as the one led by Mr. Orbán in Hungary’ carries understandable appeal. 

Unfortunately, so do Fico’s attacks on Brussels and Washington over the war in Ukraine. ‘Ukrainians never helped us,’ he said in a TV debate last year in which he called for ending assistance to Slovakia’s beleaguered neighbour. On a recent Eurobarometer poll, only 49 per cent of Slovaks expressed support for the EU’s assistance to Ukraine, compared to 85 per cent in Poland, 68 per cent in the Czech Republic, and 59 per cent in Hungary.