Europe Central: Pellegrini’s Victory In The Slovak Elections Reflects Divded Populism In Eastern Europe

Reuters

On the 6th of April, almost 2,650,000 Slovaks went to the polls to vote in the second-round runoffs of their 2024 Presidential election, deciding between the independent candidate Ivan Korcok, and Peter Pellegrini, of Hlas, a left-wing nationalist party. With the final tally, Pellegrini won by 53.1% of the vote, winning almost 200,000 more votes than Korcok, winning primarily more rural parts of the country. 

Korcok, a former diplomat who had been the permanent representative of Slovakia to the European Union and the 7th Slovak ambassador to the United States, ran on a very pro-Western platform, voicing support for Ukraine and committing to continue parts of the foreign policy of Zuzana Caputova, the progressive outgoing president. Pellegrini, however, campaigned successfully on his plans to take the government a different tack. Korcok has been a close ally of controversial populist prime minister Robert Fico, head of another left wing nationalist party, the Direction-Social Democracy party, also known as Smer. Having campaigned on a promise to stop military aid to Ukraine and voicing support for peace talks that favored Russia, Fico has draw some comparison to Victor Orban in Hungry. Fico’s Smer governing coalition has also attracted significant controversy for incorporating the hard-right Slovak Nationalist Party (SNS), an small ultranationalist party known for it racist rhetoric against Hungarians and Romani, into their government. 

The President of Slovakia does not have many executive powers, but the election of Pellegrini to the position could strength then Prime Minister Fico’s Hlas-Smer-SNS coalition significantly, as the President of Slovakia can veto legislation and nominate judges, which can substantially aide Fico in enacting his preferred policies. Though Pellegrini has positioned himself as a moderate voice in Fico’s Smer-Hlas-SNS coalition, as a part of Hlas, the most moderate of the three parties, he nevertheless took a very populist tack in both his campaign rhetoric and his proposed policies. He has voiced his support for Fico’s reforms of criminal law and the media, which have raised concerns about a potential weakening of the rule of law, according to the independent. He also embraced Fico’s pro-Russia and anti-EU/American platform, accusing his opponent, Korcok, of being a warmonger who would drag Slovakian troops into the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Pellegrini’s election represents, to some degree, and ongoing divide between pro-Western and Russophilic political blocs in Eastern and central Europe. This divide can be best illustrated in the divergent paths of the politics of Slovakia and the Czech Republic in recent years. In 2023, the Czech Republic elected as president retired general Petr Pavel, a decorated veteran of the Bosnian wars and self-described “Atlanticist” (someone who belives in the necessity of cooperation and interconnection between North American and European nations), who had chaired the NATO military committee from 2014 to 2018. Pavel’s center-right yet socially liberal policy has stands as a stark contrast to the policies Pellegrini campaigned on, which featured economically left-wing promises coupled with socially conservative rhetoric that hewed nationalist, russophilic, and euroskeptic. 

This divide has the potential to create greater waves in European politics, as the Pellegrini-Fico bloc seems to be shaping itself as a left-wing version of Orban’s populist bloc in Hungary, now that Fico’s more authoritarian and populist tendencies are no longer restrained by the former Slovakian president, Zuzana Caputova. Pellegrini has already made good on some of his campaign promises, supporting Fico’s blocking of military aid shipments to Ukraine. As populist blocs on both the right and left wing such as the Slovakian Smer-Hlas-SNS coalition, Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, and the right wing DP-PiP-BLOK coalition in Croatia (who are predicted to make significant gains in the 2024 elections) win parliamentary seats and sometimes governments, they have the potential to upset the relatively fragile European unity that has emerged in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as to be a spanner in the works for both NATO and the EU. (of which all of these state are members) 

So is the re-emergence of russophilic populism a forgone conclusion across the EU and NATO memberstates of the former Eastern Bloc? Not necessarily. As mentioned earlier, the Czech Republic elected an ardent Atlanticist and ex-NATO officer who held military decorations from the United States and France, and even in Poland, where despite former prime minister and European Council member Donald Tusk beat the populist-right PiS (law and justice) party out to form a coalition government in the 2023 elections. Despite this, in some countries, this populism appears to be gaining ground as the lines of populist parties dovetail neatly with the Kremlin’s propaganda push. 

Why would the Kremlin support these movements? Simple realpolitik, to undermine EU and NATO unity and to win back come control of their sphere of influence in the former Eastern Bloc, influence that a year ago seemed to be slipping out of the Kremlin’s hands with their invasion of Ukraine. And to a degree, this campaign is showing results, with nationalist populists making gains in many countries and expressing either direct support or lack of opposition to the Kremlin’s ambitions. However, it remains to be seen if this will work out in the long term, as previously-powerful populist groups like the aforementioned PiS have been driven out of power, and Orban’s Hungary still okayed the ascension of Sweden and Finland into NATO, a move which the Kremlin appears to have deeply feared. 

Despite these greater geopolitical forces in play, in many cases, the success of populists such as the Slovakian coalition boils down to a promise to change a system that isn’t working for a portion of the citizenry, or a wave of fearmongering against a vague-yet-specific threat. It’s a path to office, but when the change never materializes or the alleged threat no longer inspires fear, these populist coalitions struggle to maintain their hard-won seats in a fair election, or even, as in Poland, a somewhat unfair one. Whether other countries tack populist during this year of elections remains to be seen, but even if they do, it’s unlikely these governments will last. The only question is how much damage they’ll do first.