Raymond J. de Souza: How Slovakia’s left has come to resemble the MAGA right

Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico delivers a speech during the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Nuclear Energy Summit at the Brussels Expo convention centre in Brussels on March 21, 2024. Photo by KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images

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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — The prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, first took office 20 years ago this summer. He has been in and out of office since, his current (and fourth) mandate beginning in 2023. Slovakia is a small country (5.5 million people), but its prime minister is part of some bigger trends. Fico is a man of the left; his party, Direction — Social Democracy, is part of the wider array of European social democratic parties. Yet his version is not what you might expect.

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Fico supports larger social welfare payments and bigger government, but is strongly anti-immigration (especially in regard to Muslims and Roma) and takes strong socially conservative positions on homosexuality and gender. After Viktor Orbán’s defeat in neighbouring Hungary, Fico is Russia’s closest ally in the European Union.

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Leftist economics, reduced immigration, social conservatism and Putin-friendly foreign policy. That is more or less the MAGA agenda that arose 10 years after Fico first took office. He could comfortably sit in the Trump cabinet.

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Like President Donald Trump, he is mired in corruption allegations, though Slovaks seem more fussed about corruption in high office than Americans are. His social conservatism may well be a matter of opportunism rather than sincerity, another similarity with Trump. And both survived assassination attempts in 2024, though Fico’s shooting was much more serious.

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As Trump has made conservatism much less conservative in the United States, so Fico has taken social democracy in an idiosyncratic direction too. On opposite sides of the Atlantic, a new combination of political phenomena has coalesced — a coarse, combative, personal political style in service of bigger government, higher taxes, restricted migration, national identity, corruption in high office and hostility to Ukraine. Mar-a-Lago on the Danube.

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Fico was the only European Union head of government to visit Moscow in May for the annual Victory Day celebrations (over Nazi Germany, not Ukraine). Like Hungary, Fico took an anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia policy from the beginning, not unrelated to Slovakia’s dependence on Russian oil supplies.

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This is my first trip to Slovakia, so I visited Bratislava’s Freedom Square. It’s where the Velvet Revolution actually began in 1989, with a candlelight protest that was put down violently with water cannons. The culminating events took place in Prague, capital of then-Czechoslovakia, but it started here and there is a monument to November 1989 in Freedom Square.

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In 2025, enormous protests returned to Freedom Square and other cities across Slovakia, against Fico and particularly his pro-Russia policies. The slogan was “Slovakia is Europe.” In the 1980s, Czechs and Slovaks wished to return to Europe, having been cut off by the Iron Curtain. Now Slovaks see Russia desiring to divide Europe again.

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“Bratislava is not Moscow. Slovakia is Europe,” a grateful Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted on social media last year, welcoming the support of the Slovak people, if not their government.