It doesn’t help him yet. Druzhba has not been working for almost two months, the Croats do not want to let us through the Adriatic with Russian oil, the blocked Strait of Hormuz is pushing prices up, and yesterday Fico repeatedly warned of an oil shock.
At least Viktor Orbán can use it in his campaign. “Zelenskyj is using the entire oil blockade to interfere in the Hungarian elections in favor of the Tisza party. Therefore, from the Hungarian point of view, the situation is simple: if there is no oil, there will be no money,” the Hungarian prime minister unsolicited messages to users on Facebook.
Orbán hopes that if he pastes enough faces of Volodymyr Zelenskyi and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on billboards, it might save him the election. But if things continue like this, Fico will only be left with expensive fuel and futile sighs that “if today we had a stable supply of oil through the oil pipeline that is stopped by Zelensky, we would not be standing here today and not solving the problem that there will be gasoline or diesel at some point.”
Crying about how Zelenskyi manages the EU and together with it harms us, Fico will be useless. Unlike Orbán, he cannot use it immediately. He will bear only the negative. “We have to count on the fact that interest rates will go up, that inflation will go up, we must count on the fact that there will be further pressure to reduce the economic performance of the European economy as such,” he raged yesterday.
It is not enough to be afraid of the economy
And we should also consolidate this at home, because even the government’s goal of reducing the deficit to 2.8 percent of GDP for the recovery of public finances is not enough, according to the Council for Budget Responsibility. A third of this year’s consolidation effort fell on neutralizing the bad structure of measures. “Continuation of this strategy in 2027 and 2028 will require the adoption of at least one additional consolidation package over the next decade,” the budget council.
But the political overlap of the foreign and domestic economic situation is not the only thing that should worry Fico. Our prime minister had to see how Viktor Orbán was received in Brussels on Thursday. It was not pleasant. “Never in my life have I heard such crushing criticism of anyone at an EU summit,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Politico.
“What Hungary is doing is completely unacceptable,” said the president of the European Council, António Costa, unexpectedly. So far, no one has crossed such a red line, he claims. According to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, European leaders are deeply outraged by Orbán. Merz is convinced that this will have lasting effects. It’s not just words. It was visible.
The “ice” atmosphere of the summit, which the new Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten spoke about, is described in President Zelensky’s video speech. While all the leaders are sitting next to each other in their seats and watching the speech on computer screens, Orbán is standing alone far away behind yet another circle of empty tables, leaning against it and looking thoughtfully at his colleagues.
Alone as a fence post
He literally did not sit at the table where decisions were made. He was not in the closest circle of trust, he was just watching him from the outside. As Politico writes, Germany and France did not want to waste time and political capital to convince him. According to the portal, most leaders expect that this was Orbán’s last rise. Hungary has elections in two weeks, and Fidesz is not the favorite for the first time in sixteen years. We hope that Fico also has chills from the icy atmosphere.
He is certainly aware that if Orbán loses, he will be left alone in Brussels with this attitude. And there will be consequences. “I am interested in solving this crisis situation regarding the Druzhba pipeline in cooperation with the European Union. We are in the European Union and we want to be in it,” he said relatively conciliatoryly on Friday.
“Please don’t write nonsense. Slovakia is not blocking the loan,” he objected, although he recently confidently declared that Slovakia would take over Hungary’s baton if necessary. And he even no longer declares that the Druzhba pipeline was not actually hit. “I’m not saying it’s not damaged. We just don’t know the extent of the damage. We don’t know what needs to be done about it.” That’s a big change in rhetoric.
Perhaps he realized that a sovereign policy on the four sides of the world and beating our chests that we will not parrot everything that Brussels says sounds good in a video and at a rally, but in a real crisis we cannot cope without the EU. He does not enjoy this position of rebel prime minister. Not only will he achieve nothing and no one will help him, but if he follows the Hungarian Prime Minister, he himself will be pushed to the sidelines. The same thing will happen to him that he says about the EU – he will end up like a fence post.
It is not only in Slovakia’s interest that this does not happen. It is also in the interest of Robert Fico himself. It is Orbán who should be more worried than Zelensky. It can quite easily happen to him that if he behaves like the Hungarian prime minister in Brussels, he will end up the same as Orbán in Budapest – as paranoid, terrified and, finally, probably as a loser.
