BRATISLAVA—On Sept. 30, many Slovaks went to sleep having presumed that the country would be led by perhaps the most progressive government in its modern history. The next morning, however, they woke up to an alternate universe with a new winner: a scandal-battered political veteran, who, in a number of ways, has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.
This emotional roller coaster was caused by the dramatic inaccuracy of a local exit poll, which predicted a certain victory for Progressive Slovakia, a liberal and urban elite party led by Michal Simecka. It eventually came second to Robert Fico’s Smer-SD, a social democratic party that has over the last several years turned more nationalistic and populist. With all the votes counted, Smer-SD won 42 of the parliament’s 150 seats. Progressive Slovakia secured 32.
Fico, unlike 39-year-old relative newcomer Simecka, has been shaping Slovak politics since the mid-2000s. Having resigned in early 2018—and with a series of electoral defeats for Smer in European, presidential, and parliamentary races, as well as a split within his party in between—he has made a stunning comeback, boosting his party’s support from just 9 percent in January 2021 to almost 23 percent in 2023.
In many ways, his return was paved by the previous anti-corruption coalition, which due to its chaotic style of governance dampened voters’ enthusiasm. In a time of Russian invasion of Ukraine and galloping inflation, Fico—Slovakia’s longest-serving prime minister (2006-2010 and 2012-2018)—could pitch himself as a guarantor of stability and consistent decision-making.
His triumph is all the more impressive as he has done little to distance himself from his past deeds that pushed not only his party but the entire country to perhaps the darkest place it’s been in its modern history. Almost six years ago, he was swept away by a wave of public anger inspired by the massive protests that erupted after the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova. Now, symbolically, Fico’s close collaborators—Robert Kalinak and Tibor Gaspar, whose behavior as interior minister and police chief, respectively, at the time of Kuciak’s murder was under scrutiny—entered parliament with one of the best results in this election.
This crime—committed on Fico’s watch and ordered by a local millionaire, his former neighbor—shed light on the way he ruled the country. The image of Smer-SD emerged as a hermetic and highly opaque clique that grabbed control of major institutions in the country, including in justice and police, rewarded loyalists by distributing public assets, and was influenced from behind the scenes by shady businessmen (some with ties to organized crime) who operated with impunity.
This is, of course, a recipe that both Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Polish ruling party head Jaroslaw Kaczynski have long been successfully implementing in Hungary and Poland, respectively, on a much larger scale. For instance, Fico never attempted to turn the public broadcaster into a hard-line propaganda mouthpiece or use it to discredit opponents, as his two neighbors have. Nor did he try to create a homogenous nationalist-ideological umbrella for his appetite for power. Nor did he make the West a favorite attack target, being a rather quiet but loyal EU and NATO member. In a nutshell, the main headache for Slovakia under Fico was corruption and clientelism, not authoritarianism.
His attitude toward Russia is also far more complex than Orban’s indiscriminate support. Many international outlets tend to label Fico as “pro-Russian,” but, as usual, they have looked at rhetoric and symbolic gestures. And these rarely match Fico’s deeds. After all, it was he who purchased American weapons, including F-16 fighter aircraft and Black Hawk helicopters, to replace Slovakia’s ageing Soviet-era military equipment. And, although he did not succeed in decreasing the country’s dependence on Russia’s natural gas, oil, and nuclear fuel, it was his governments that introduced far-reaching investments in infrastructure that drastically limited Slovakia’s vulnerability to gas supply disruption.
Also, back in 2014 it was Fico’s Slovakia that, to Russia’s dismay, came to Ukraine’s rescue by opening up reverse flow of gas after Russia annexed Crimea and increased prices for its gas.
For years, Fico has cast himself as an arbitrator between the country’s strong economic rooting in the West and rather pro-Russian public sympathies, which, in political terms, have been utilized mainly by the Slovak National Party (SNS), Fico’s former and now new junior coalition partner. This chaotic group of rather obnoxious individuals, many with far-right views and obscure ties to Russia, has long pushed for halting Ukraine military aid—something that Fico also promised in the campaign to attract radical voters.
Even if he delivers, which is expected, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that Slovakia is turning east, as some warn. It’s still more likely for Fico to continue to play the same game, with the goal of keeping the country close to the EU mainstream (and the flow of money from Brussels) but rhetorically satisfying both the SNS and pro-Russian figures from his own circle, such as Lubos Blaha, Marian Kery, and Juraj Blanar. Back in April, at the meeting with U.S. Ambassador he supported Ukraine’s accession to the EU, while in his first post-election public appearance, he reminded citizens that under his leadership, Slovakia joined the eurozone and Schengen Area, which both could be seen as signs to Brussels that no major turns in the country’s foreign agenda are expected.
Of course, the attempt to take the country into more heavy-handed directions may be too captivating. In many ways, he’s a different man now. The long and toxic campaign has proved that, having had a near-death experience, in both political and human terms (back in 2016, he underwent heart surgery), Fico has become angrier, perhaps more eager to take revenge, and less fussy about the optics of his support base. These were not only older voters from small towns lured by his generous social welfare policy and socially traditional agenda whom he had remobilized that gave him victory, but also anti-vaxxers and other consumers of the far-right playbook.
Still, the hope that Fico will pocket his more radical image from the campaign—despite his personal grudge and a noxious coalition partner—is not based on his good will, but arithmetic. To form a stable government, he needed not only SNS (10 seats), but mainly the Hlas-SD party (27), created by a group of defectors from Smer-SD and led by moderate Peter Pellegrini, who is at odds with some of Smer-SD’s most contentious figures. The three-party coalition now has 79 seats, just three votes above a majority—enough for it to fill major posts and pass laws, but not enough to make constitutional amendments.
This shaky advantage will deny Fico the latitude that both Orban and Kaczynski have enjoyed in their countries. What’s more, relatively collectively ruled Smer-SD is by no means a mass party comparable to Orban’s iron-fisted Fidesz or Kaczynski’s Law and Justice, which both have, year by year, expanded their voter bases so as to depict themselves as the voice of the nation. This year, Smer-SD won with just 681,000 votes. Putting aside the 2020 campaign shaped by Kuciak’s murder, it is the party’s worst result since 2006.
With all these limits in mind, it’s doubtful that Fico will succeed in transforming Slovakia into a Hungary-like single party monolith, at least not in the next four years. What he can do, though, is to attempt to restore his influence over public institutions—especially judicial ones—and among economic actors, verbally antagonize journalists, take control over the narrative provided by the public broadcaster, and further divide and radicalize the society—all of which could serve as solid foundations for more Orbanesque approach in the future.
Whether he succeeds or not will depend on the Slovaks themselves—especially the sensible members of his coalition government and those motivated by the memory of Kuciak and Kusnirova.