Mr Putin wins another one

Slovakia’s parliamentary election, held last Saturday (see my preview here), produced very much the expected result. Smer-SD, the party of authoritarian former prime minister Robert Fico, topped the poll with 22.9% (up 4.6% on 2020) and 42 of the 150 seats (up four), followed by the left-liberal Progressive Slovakia with 18.0% and 32 seats. (Official results are here, helpfully provided in English.)

That’s pretty much what the opinion polls had been saying for the last couple of months. But because Progressive Slovakia seemed to have been narrowing the gap, and an exit poll on Sunday morning actually put it slightly ahead, Fico has won an important psychological victory. And psychology matters a lot in war – and at least in eastern Europe, elections now are wartime elections.

In the year and a half since the invasion of Ukraine, most electoral tests in the region have been favorable to the Ukrainian cause. Parties that had conspicuously hitched their wagon to Vladimir Putin’s star have mostly done badly. The big exception was last year’s election in Hungary, when Viktor Orbán won a landslide on a promise to keep Hungary out of the war. If Fico can now put together a government, he will end Orbán’s isolation and become the second pro-Putin leader in the European Union.

Will he be able to? Smer-SD is a long way short of a majority; support from the far-right Slovak National Party, which after falling short of the threshold last time (like Progressive Slovakia) returned to parliament with 5.6% and ten seats, would bring him to 52. Against that, a plausible four-party centre-to-centre-right coalition (Progressive Slovakia, Ordinary People (16), Christian Democrats (12) and Freedom & Solidarity (11)) has 71.

The balance is held by Hlas-SD, ideologically close to Smer-SD (from which it split in 2020) but anti-Putin and pro-European. It won 14.7% and 27 seats; its leader, Peter Pellegrini, has hinted that he could be willing to reconcile with Fico, but it’s expected that a long period of negotiations will be required. (Two parties just missed the threshold, the neo-fascist Republic with 4.8% and the ethnic Hungarian alliance with 4.4%; the Democrats were further back on 2.9% and We Are Family on 2.2%.)

On the one hand, the anti-Fico side has a much bigger base to start with; even with Hlas he would have only a narrow majority, and Slovak politics is chronically subject to defections. It would also have the support of president Zuzana Čaputová, an opponent of Fico. On the other hand, the anti-Fico parties don’t have a good record of co-operating; the previous government, led by Ordinary People, collapsed after Freedom & Solidarity walked out. Added to that is the psychological boost Fico has achieved by coming first and exceeding expectations.

Assuming Fico succeeds, coalition politics will operate to constrain him (unlike Orbán, who has a majority in his own right), and Slovakia’s geopolitical weight is small in any case. And Ukraine’s supporters can console themselves with the fact that pro-Ukraine parties won a clear majority of the vote. Nonetheless, at a time when war-weariness is making itself felt in a number of quarters, this is the sort of result that Putin wants.