When it is necessary to strengthen aid to Ukraine, one blackmails and the other second him, slanders President Volodymyr Zelensky and makes him an ungrateful enemy of Slovakia. When decisions are made about energy security and weaning off dependence on Russian fossil fuels, both are doing their best to keep the old model as long as possible.
It’s hard to explain it other than the hope that Russia will win the war and then we’ll go back to business as usual with it. This is most visible in the dispute over Russian oil through the Druzhba. Instead of pushing for accelerated diversification and the search for technical solutions in cooperation with partners in the EU, the government is once again relying on confrontation, threats and a blackmail tone towards Ukraine.
Thus, the Prime Minister effectively helps Viktor Orbán in the election campaign, in which the hostile attitude towards Ukraine is the main theme. It defends the interests of the Hungarian MOL group, to which Slovnaft belongs, and promotes the policy of the Hungarian state, which is its shareholder.
The backdrop for Orbán
The Slovak prime minister is thus consciously moving into the political shadow of Budapest. Instead of Slovakia acting as an independent actor with its own interests, it is increasingly acting as an appendage of Orbán’s political and electoral strategy. When Orbán escalates the conflict with Ukraine and Brussels, Fico creates a political backdrop for him.
When the Hungarian prime minister uses the energy crisis for pre-election mobilization, the Slovak prime minister seconded him. The result? Slovakia does not look like a country that guards its own state interest, reputation and position in the EU. It looks like a country that is adopting a foreign vocabulary, foreign conflicts and increasingly foreign political priorities.
And right here is the essence of all Fico’s lie about the incompetent and declining European Union. The EU is not weaker because it lacks economic performance, market, human capital or institutional weight, although it has to reform in view of the changes in the world – and it has already started. It is weaker mainly because it is being corroded from the inside by politicians who have made the blocking of joint decisions a method of their political survival.
Orbán is a veteran in this. Fico became his apprentice and faithful assistant. First, together, they undermine the Union’s ability to act quickly and decisively, and then cynically stand in front of the cameras and say how incompetent and powerless Brussels is. At the same time, they are the ones who produce this weakness.
That’s not realism. That’s an old political trick. They use the weakness, in which they have a large share, as an argument for the further weakening of the common European space in accordance with the interests of the Putin regime and the American government. It’s pyromanship masquerading as fire expertise.
Slovakia on the periphery
What the fourth Fico government is doing alongside and in the shadow of the Orbán government is not a sovereign policy. It does not only weaken the EU. It primarily weakens Slovakia. When the continent’s new security architecture is being formed, Slovakia finds itself in a political vacuum.
There is no interest in it, and the citizens of the Slovak Republic listen to the statements of EU member state politicians that European defense will be built without Orbán and without Fico. They see that the core of the new EU is being formed around the six economically strongest states of the Union, which make up 70 percent of its GDP.
And Slovakia is outside, on the periphery. During the government of the same Robert Fico, who even ten years ago declared that Slovakia has the economic, financial and political potential to be part of the core of the EU.
Small states do not become insignificant in Europe because they do not have huge armies or land area. They become insignificant when they destroy their credibility through their own political mistakes, fall out with their partners, stop being value-based and predictable, and start serving foreign political games instead of the interests of the community of which they are a member.
The truth about our destiny
This is exactly what is happening in Slovakia today under Fico’s leadership. Unlike Denmark or Finland, whose population size is comparable to ours, or the Baltic states, which are even smaller.
Slovakia was strongest when it sat at the table as a partner, when it was part of coalitions that make decisions. When the state leadership understood that membership in the EU is the strongest guarantee of our sovereignty. It cannot be strong and sovereign when it pushes itself to the sidelines as an eternal complainer, slanders its European family and behaves as a “spoiler” of European agreements and unification.
Therefore, when Robert Fico talks about a weak Europe and a small, powerless Slovakia that no one takes seriously, he is not actually revealing the truth about our destiny. He gives an account of his own “sovereign policy to all the four quarters of the world.” No, the European Union is diminishing the strength and importance of Slovakia.
They are reduced by the prime minister, who – with the approval of the members of his government and coalition partners – decided that instead of strengthening our voice and influence in Europe, he would act as an extra in Orbán’s game against the European Union.
