A party headed by a pro-Kremlin figure came out top after securing more votes than expected in an election in Slovakia, preliminary results show, in what could pose a challenge to NATO and EU unity on Ukraine.
According to preliminary results released by Slovakia’s Statistical Office at 9 a.m. local time, Robert Fico’s populist SMER party won 22.9% of the vote.
Progressive Slovakia (PS), a liberal and pro-Ukrainian party won 17.9%.
Fico, a two-time former prime minister, now has a chance to regain the job but must first seek coalition partners as his party did not secure a big enough share of the vote to govern on its own.
I cannot fathom how Slovakians arrive at the conclusion that sucking up to Russia is in any way in their best interest?
I bet there’s a lot of Russian propaganda behind it, but how does reality not beat propaganda? It’s like a nation of 25+% anti-vaxxers!
I’d imagine corruption in government plays a huge role. Seems to be a lot of it these days.
I think it’s important to point out, that “winning elections” does not mean that the majority of Slovaks support them. They just won as a party with most votes. (23% so not even a quarter)
They just won the mandate to form a government for which they’ll need at least two other parties to form a majority. The anti EU/NATO stance might be a problem here as it’s not universally shared among possible coalition partners.
It is misleading to draw such a strong “Slovakia is pro-russian country” conclusion based on a single party getting the most votes, because many of the other parties that are at the very least silent if not outright pro-nato/eu with significant amount of the votes.
Even comparison to Hungary is a huge stretch as Orbán’s party alone got more than 50% of the votes. As it is now, Smer has to form a coalition with other (in many ways more moderate) parties which is already not 100% given - it would not be the first time when the winning party ends up in opposition. And going forward they either avoid these friction points (so they end up acting more moderate) or they risk coalition breaking apart with early election or opposition forming government.
It’s like a nation of 25+% anti-vaxxers!
Well… yes, actually.
Oh shit! I forgot some East European countries were extremely anti-vaxxer too.
Yeah, and covid helped them very much. Fico was seemingly on his way out but then covid happened, the current government was incompetent in many ways and people extremely irritaded by everything. Fico (among others) ramped up the propaganda and disinformtion campaign, told people what they wanted to hear and slingshoted himself back to popularity.
I don’t think they’re mainly pro Russian.
Maybe against NATO and US foreign policy.
Nowadays non G7 countries need to pick a side. And most have seen what American interference did to other countries.
For more information please visit: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Afghanistan.
Well Smer is very much pro-Russian.
As usual CNN is making out of this a bigger deal than it actually is. These are slovak parliamentaries, so it’s not FPTP, therefore he didn’t “win” ( yet, anyway ). This seems to be just the social-democratic party’s growth from 19% in the last election to 23%, which would be in trend with growing conservative sentiment in europe. Besides, PS also grew from 8% to 18%, but that doesn’t generate as many clicks as “SLOVAKIA IS NOW PRO-RUSSIA!” so it’s barely a sidenote. Key takeaways are that they will have to seek coalition if they really want to pose a challenge to NATO policies.
Russian bots do a lot of damage. I see it in my own country Slovenia. All the biggest public forums are overrun by extreme pro Russian sentiment. Any reasonable debate is out of the question. It creates a bubble for radicalising people, especially young people that need a reason to rebel against the government, the west and EU.
Honestly, I don’t understand why this happens
Old female demography. Mostly uneducated (only school, no further education), mostly russian TV watching groups eating up russian propaganda and misinformation about fear of EU, Immigrants and LGBT. You can pick any country in east europe from poland to the south balkan, the russian misinformation is very effective pandering the non-existing “great replacement”, a lie that russia is pushing that the EU want to replace the citiziens of each country with a different ethnicity. Why? Doesn’t matter, fear is not rational. At the same time russia is bringing young people from syria (a region they themself keep destabilized to create desperate masses to flee into Europe) to Moscovia with fake letters of free University Invites and then pack these people up in busses and brings them through Belarus to the outer borders of the EU countries to increase the stories, pictures and scenes of mass immigration to prop up the talking point of the far right in all these countries. It is very effective and people who only watch russian TV will never see the grand scheme and will vote hard right, against their own good.
shit.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A party headed by a pro-Kremlin figure came out top after securing more votes than expected in an election in Slovakia, preliminary results show, in what could pose a challenge to NATO and EU unity on Ukraine.
According to preliminary results released by Slovakia’s Statistical Office at 9 a.m. local time, Robert Fico’s populist SMER party won 22.9% of the vote.
Fico, a two-time former prime minister, now has a chance to regain the job but must first seek coalition partners as his party did not secure a big enough share of the vote to govern on its own.
Slovakia, an eastern European nation of about 5.5 million people, was going to the polls to choose its fifth prime minister in four years after seeing a series of shaky coalition governments.
If Poland’s governing Law and Justice party manages to win a third term in Polish parliamentary elections next month, this bloc of EU troublemakers could become even stronger.
The campaign was marked by concerns over disinformation, with Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s top digital affairs official, saying in advance the vote would be a “test case” of how effective social media companies have been in countering Russian propaganda in Slovakia.
The original article contains 942 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
EU sanctions will continue until national policy improves.
Not a supporter of the war but just noticed that western media is covering this with a sprinkling of their own propaganda. Just read telegraph’s piece on this. They seem to think that nato’s expansion is normal and just fine. And they also seem to call the presence of Nazi groups in Ukraine Russian propaganda.
There is clear propaganda war going on on both sides. Anti nato doesn’t neccesarily mean pro russia. A lot of western people don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around this.
They seem to think that nato’s expansion is normal and just fine.
Damn NATO, forcing countries to join them.
