Promotional billboard for Fico's campaign in Slovakia. Photo: Boell.de.
(OrinocoTribune.com)âThe Social Democratic party (Smer) of Robert Fico won last week’s parliamentary election in Slovakia. Among other campaign promises, Fico pledged to immediately halt his country’s substantial military aid to Ukraine.
“People in Brussels, in London, in Berlin, and in Washington are extremely unhappy about these developments,” said Alexander Mercouris, political analyst with Youtube channel The Duran.
Fico was prime minister of Slovakia from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2012 to 2018. His Smer party (called Direction in English) was created following a split within the Party of the Democratic Left which, in turn, was the successor to the Communist Party of Czecho-Slovakia, which held power during the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. In 2018, amid a national scandal surrounding the murder of journalist Jån Kuciak, who had been investigating Italian criminal networks operating in Slovakia, Fico resigned in order to allow a new government to be formed.
Mercouris described Fico’s Smer as “what you might call an old-style leftist party, I mean, not the kind of leftists that we have become used to in the West, you know, with a focus on identity and social issues. It is more like Social Democratic parties used to be. Of course, there has been these allegations of corruption and authoritarianism. I am not going to waste time discussing them in this program. The fact is that, being a sort of old-style leftist, almost by definition, is going to make the European elite deeply mistrustful of somebody like Fico.”
Mercouris predicts that the US and its vassals will attempt to destabilize the new Slovakian government, in addition to that of Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor OrbĂĄn has opposed Ukraine’s integration into NATO and the EU.
“They are going to try and undermine the economies of these countries, and Slovakia is a small place, as we have discussed, and, of course, they will use corruption,” said Mercouris on October 2. “They used corruption successfully against Fico before, and they will use corruption to undermine him again. They will try and weaken him by working on his coalition partners, and, of course, they will also organize the usual protests in the streets: young people coming out, easily swept along by the slogans that we have seen used so effectively in so many places. So that kind of campaign for destabilization is probably going to start now, and probably the plans for it are already in place.”
During his previous tenures, Fico opposed planned construction of US military bases in neighboring Czechia and Poland. During his first administration, Fico pulled Slovakian troops out of Iraq and described the US-led war on the country as “unjust and wrong.”
Mercouris noted that the election process was marred by inauspicious details: “The exit poll suggested that, in fact, Fico had lost, and it was the Liberal party that had actually won. For several hours, this was all over the media and, of course, that was not true. It was completely wrong. But it is a good sign that the gremlins are already working, that they are doing the usual things, manipulating surveys and polls, and we will be getting an awful lot more of that over the next few years.”
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Although Fico’s party emerged as the leading party in the parliamentary elections, it will need to form a coalition in order to achieve a majority. It is imagined that Fico will be able to band together with the Social Democratic party and the deeply conservative Slovak National Party (SNS), which also opposes continuing military aid to Ukraine.
“For a time, [Fico] was a discredited figure,” explained Mercouris. “His party split… It did not look like he would ever come back, and he has been able to come back because of the stance he took over the war and fact that a solid critical mass of people in Slovakia, a Slavic country, remember, agree with him. So I think this is a solid win, it is a solid coalition government that he is going to form, and it has got a clear agenda.”
Special for Orinoco Tribune by Steve Lalla
OT/SL/DD/BLA
Steve Lalla
Steve Lalla is a journalist, researcher and analyst. His areas of interest include geopolitics, history, and current affairs. He has contributed to MR Online, Counterpunch, Resumen LatinoAmericano English, ANTICONQUISTA, Orinoco Tribune, and others.
