Starmer and Corbyn’s Putinist friend

Yesterday’s election in Slovakia has been reported in the mainstream press (and even by some H&D readers who should know better) as a victory for the ‘populist right’, or even for ‘nationalists’.

In fact the election winner (and given the fissiparous nature of Slovak politics it’s important to point out that he ‘won’ with less than 23% of the vote and will need to find coalition partners) was the ex-communist Robert Fico, whose social democratic party Smer remains a member of all the usual international alliances of mainstream leftwing parties.

The only reason why some on the vacuous “dissident right” have welcomed Fico’s victory, is that this Slovak leftist is a de facto supporter of the Kremlin’s anti-Ukrainian, anti-European aggression.

Fico has insisted that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a war started “by Ukrainian nazis and fascists”. And predictably this Stalinist rhetoric has been echoed by the Kremlin’s useful idiots, including some so-called ‘nationalists’.

Ironically, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is a longstanding partner of Fico’s party in three international socialist alliances – the Party of European Socialists, Progressive Alliance, and Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. The Slovak party is also part of an even more leftwing organisation, the Socialist International, where Starmer’s Labour now only has “observer” status.

In 2006 Smer was suspended from the Party of European Socialists because Fico accepted a ‘far right’ party into his coalition government, but this suspension ended in 2008 and Fico now seems to be accepted by the likes of Starmer and Germany’s social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a good socialist comrade!

During the coming days and weeks, Smer will look for coalition allies. The Slovak nationalist party SMS might again be one of them, but with 5.6% (10 MPs) it has less than half the support it enjoyed when it joined one of Fico’s previous coalitions in 2006.

The real kingmakers this time will be another leftwing party, Hlas, with 14.7% and 27 MPs. We shouldn’t expect much in the way of political principle in these negotiations, still less should we expect anything resembling racial nationalism, whether or not SMS ministers join the payroll.

What we can sadly continue to expect is that the ignorant and deluded ‘dissident right’ will continue to disgrace themselves by applauding Putinist victories, even when these victories are for parties of the socialist / social democratic left.

Slovak national-socialists gain seats

The Slovak national socialist party People’s Party – Our Slovakia (L’SNS) led by Marian Kotleba gained three extra MPs in yesterday’s general election and is now the joint-third largest party in the Slovak Parliament with 17 seats.

Meanwhile the more ‘moderate’ Slovak National Party, which at the previous election in 2016 was slightly larger than L’SNS, was wiped out yesterday, falling from 8.6% to 3.2% and losing all of its 15 seats.

L’SNS polled exactly the same vote as four years ago, 8.0%, but it seems likely that a large slice of the former Slovak National Party vote went to a populist conservative party called ‘Ordinary People’, who were the big winners yesterday on an anti-corruption platform.

‘Ordinary People’ seems to be somewhere between the populist nationalism of Victor Orban and the more amorphous protest vote party typified by Italy’s Five Star Movement. Its leader has already said he will be prepared to enter coalition talks with any party except for the defeated government party – the corrupt socialists – and the beyond-the-pale ‘nazis’ of L’SNS.

In practice this means some sort of deal with the anti-immigration party ‘We are Family’, who have 17 seats, and with a libertarian, eurosceptic party ‘Freedom and Solidarity’ with 13 seats. The pro-EU liberal alliance ‘For the People’ backed by Slovakia’s president Zuzana Čaputová (who won a resounding victory hailed by the world’s liberal media as recently as 2019) was in sixth place with 12 seats, so would not be able to reach a working majority in alliance with ‘Ordinary People’.