“GUESS WHO’S back!” wrote Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister in a happy tweet. Robert Fico, twice prime minister of Slovakia, fell from power in 2018 after the murder of a journalist investigating high-level corruption, which led to mass protests. Now he looks set to lead his country once again. Mr Fico’s Smer party took 23% of the votes, coming first in the election on September 30th. This puts him in a strong position to form the next government, in coalition with a party that once split from his own, plus another, extreme right-wing party whose leader has long been one of Russia’s staunchest supporters.

Slovakia’s European partners will fret. Allies of Mr Fico, including senior intelligence officers and a former police chief and Smer politician, have been convicted of or indicted for corruption. Last year Mr Fico himself was charged with leading a “criminal organisation” that controlled the police. The case was later dropped amid controversy, and Mr Fico denies corruption. But a former close associate says that his main aim in returning to power is “that he will not be prosecuted”. Grigorij Meseznikov, head of the Institute for Public Affairs, a think-tank in Bratislava, says he expects a government led by Mr Fico to “create as comfortable conditions as possible” for Smer associates who have been indicted or are being investigated for corruption.

Nor, he adds, does he expect “any good developments” regarding Ukraine. During three decades in Slovak politics Mr Fico tacked left on domestic policy, while foreign policy was a lesser priority. He was a pragmatist who played with nationalism, says his former associate, because (Mr Fico once told him) “the votes are lying on the floor and if I don’t pick them up, the guys to my right will do so.”

That has changed. A new Fico-led government can be expected to ally itself in the European Union and NATO with Mr Orban’s prickly, conservative, pro-Russian nationalism. Slovakia has recently been run by unwieldy governments, but they have been staunch supporters of Ukraine, handing over its Soviet-made S-300 air-defence system and 13 MiG fighter jets. There is little left to give, but Slovak arms factories are now fulfilling contracts for Ukraine. Mr Fico has pledged to stop sending arms to Ukraine.

That is not yet quite guaranteed. With the election won, Mr Fico could say that realpolitik means Slovakia must not alienate the EU and NATO. Observers looking for such a shift will watch to see whether he appoints Miroslav Lajcak, his former foreign minister, now an EU official, to his old job, signalling that he does not want to stray too far from the European mainstream.

His likely partners add further complexity. One is Peter Pellegrini, who split from Mr Fico and founded Hlas (“Voice”) in 2020. He has not taken pro-Russian positions, but aligned himself with Mr Fico in 2021 to oppose a defence agreement with America. (Some envision Mr Pelligrini, a former prime minister himself, leading a coalition government, though Mr Fico will have the best chance.) The other potential partner is the extreme pro-Russian Slovak National Party, led by Andrej Danko. Mr Danko, after meeting Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, in 2019, said “I bow to everything Mr Lavrov does” in international relations.

Polling shows that Mr Fico’s voters and those with pro-Russian views tend to be older and less well educated. Younger and better educated ones favour the newish Progressive Slovakia party, which came second (after polls had hinted it might win). Its views on everything from Ukraine to LGBT rights align with those of western European liberal parties—but not with a majority of Slovaks.

Research by Globsec, a Slovak think-tank, reveals distrust in institutions, susceptibility to conspiracy theories and deep-seated anti-Americanism. Though 40% of Slovaks agree that Russia is primarily responsible for the war in Ukraine, 51% believe either that the West provoked Russia, or that Ukraine did so because it “oppressed” Russian-speakers. And 66% agreed that “the US is dragging Slovakia into a war with Russia because it is profiting from it.” Only 48% agreed that liberal democracy based on equality, human rights and the rule of law was good for the country.

According to Dominka Hajdu of Globsec, modern Slovak identity stems from 19th-century pan-Slavic ideas that envisioned Russia as a protector. Today, she says, many Slovaks believe that “Russia is this big actor and that we are poor, small Slovaks, and we have to do what they say because they’re so big, and we cannot do anything.”

In a Bratislava café Vladimir, a retired 79-year-old structural engineer who had returned after 50 years in Germany and Britain, says that he believed that Zuzana Caputova, Slovakia’s president and a founder of Progressive Slovakia, was an American spy, that Ukrainian refugees were leeching off the Slovak state and that the Ukrainians were fools to fight. In 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, “the president said we should not fight the Russians. If we had, then Bratislava and Prague would have been in ruins. This is what Ukrainians should have done.” ■