Slovakia voted yesterday in an election whose consequences extend beyond a country of roughly 5.4 million people. Former prime minister Robert Fico’s Smer party finished first with about 23% of the vote, placing him in the strongest position to attempt to form the next government. Fico campaigned explicitly against continuing Slovak military assistance to Ukraine, criticised European sanctions on Russia and argued that Western governments should push Kyiv and Moscow towards negotiations rather than continue attempting to change the war through weapons. His victory does not automatically implement those policies because Smer won only 42 seats in the 150-seat parliament and needs coalition partners. It nevertheless represents another sign that the political coalition supporting Ukraine is becoming more contested as the war enters its second autumn.
Slovakia’s previous government had been unusually supportive of Ukraine. The country opened its border to refugees after Russia’s invasion, transferred its S-300 air-defence system and became the second NATO state to agree to provide Ukraine with Soviet-designed MiG-29 fighter aircraft. This policy made strategic sense to politicians who believed Russia’s invasion represented a direct threat to the European security order and that helping Ukraine defend itself reduced the probability that Russian power would threaten NATO territory later. Yet strategic logic at the government level does not automatically produce permanent political consent at the voter level.
That distinction is becoming increasingly important because the war has changed from an emergency into a long-duration political commitment. During the first months after February 2022, Western governments could mobilise public support around the shock of Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s immediate survival. Refugees arrived, Kyiv appeared at risk and the moral structure of the conflict seemed relatively straightforward. Nineteen months later, the political environment is different. The front has moved more slowly, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has not produced a rapid breakthrough, governments are discussing ammunition production measured in years, and voters increasingly understand that supporting Ukraine may require sustained expenditure without a clear date on which the commitment ends.
This does not weaken the strategic case for supporting Ukraine by itself. If anything, allowing Russia to benefit from waiting could strengthen the argument for long-term assistance. The political problem is that democracies discount future benefits while voters experience current costs directly. A Slovak household knows what it pays for food and energy this month. It cannot observe the hypothetical future Russian aggression that military assistance to Ukraine may help deter. Governments therefore have to persuade citizens to finance a policy whose principal benefit may be a counterfactual event that never occurs.
This is the political economy of deterrence. Successful deterrence produces nothing visible. If supporting Ukraine contributes to preventing future Russian expansion, voters will never see the war that did not happen. They will see taxes, military expenditure and economic disruption. Policies whose benefits are invisible therefore require unusually high institutional trust because citizens must believe the government’s explanation of the counterfactual.
Slovakia enters this debate with weaker trust than several neighbouring countries. A Globsec survey conducted earlier this year found that 51% of Slovak respondents blamed the West or Ukraine for the war, while half viewed the United States as posing a security threat to Slovakia. Those results were substantially more sceptical of Western institutions than responses across most of the other Central and Eastern European countries surveyed. Russian disinformation has contributed to that environment, but attributing the entire result to propaganda would be analytically lazy. Domestic political failures and economic grievances created conditions in which those narratives became more persuasive.
This distinction matters because disinformation rarely creates political vulnerability from nothing. It works best when it attaches itself to experiences citizens already recognise. Slovakia experienced inflation above 12% during 2022, partly as Europe’s energy shock followed Russia’s invasion and the breakdown of previous energy relationships. The country’s previous centre-right governing coalition also collapsed after months of internal conflict, producing an early election. Citizens therefore encountered genuine economic pressure and political dysfunction before anyone needed to persuade them that the existing government had failed.
Fico’s political skill has been converting those grievances into one narrative. Higher energy prices become evidence that sanctions hurt Europeans more than Russia. Government instability becomes evidence that liberal parties cannot govern. Military aid becomes evidence that Slovak resources are being spent on somebody else’s war. American influence becomes evidence that Slovakia’s foreign policy lacks sovereignty. Each individual claim can be debated empirically, but together they offer voters a coherent explanation for why their lives became more difficult.
This is how successful populism often works. It does not necessarily invent every grievance. It organises grievances causally. Inflation, distrust, war fatigue and political instability already exist; the politician explains who is responsible and promises to restore control. The power lies less in creating dissatisfaction than in giving dissatisfaction a political direction.
The government’s counterargument therefore cannot simply be that voters have been misled. If Slovak citizens experience higher living costs while their government transfers military equipment abroad, policymakers need to explain why those policies serve Slovakia itself. Moral solidarity with Ukraine may persuade some voters. A durable foreign policy usually needs a national-interest argument as well.
That argument exists. Slovakia shares a border with Ukraine. A Russian victory that substantially weakens Ukrainian sovereignty could bring Russian military power closer to Slovakia and alter the security environment across Central Europe. NATO membership provides Slovakia with collective defence, but the credibility of that defence partly depends on whether territorial conquest is allowed to become strategically profitable in Europe.
From this perspective, weapons sent to Ukraine are not charity.
They are forward defence without Slovak soldiers fighting the war themselves.
Whether voters accept that framing depends partly on their expectations about Russia. A citizen who views Russia as a long-term security threat may consider Ukrainian military assistance inexpensive insurance. A citizen who believes NATO expansion or Western policy substantially caused the conflict will interpret exactly the same expenditure as unnecessarily prolonging a war.
Foreign policy therefore depends on causal narratives about the international system.
This is why information competition matters so much. Russia has incentives to convince European voters that Western military assistance is responsible for prolonging suffering, that sanctions are economically self-destructive and that negotiated territorial concessions would restore stability. Ukraine and its supporters have incentives to argue that reducing assistance would reward aggression and make future wars more likely.
Neither narrative becomes true because it is politically useful.
Citizens need evidence capable of distinguishing them.
The difficulty is that the counterfactual remains unknowable. Nobody can observe simultaneously what happens if Western aid continues and what would have happened if it stopped. Foreign-policy debates therefore contain unavoidable uncertainty, creating more space for ideology and trust to shape interpretation than many domestic policies do.
This makes democratic coalition management central to Ukraine’s security. Russia does not necessarily need to defeat NATO militarily to weaken Western support. It can benefit if electoral politics gradually produces governments less willing to provide assistance.
That creates a time-horizon asymmetry. Vladimir Putin operates inside an authoritarian system capable of maintaining strategic priorities without competitive national elections threatening immediate reversal. Western governments must repeatedly renew political consent through elections, parliamentary budgets and coalition negotiations.
Authoritarian systems can therefore possess an advantage in strategic patience.
That advantage should not be exaggerated. Democracies can sustain policies for decades when enough cross-party consensus exists. NATO itself survived changing governments throughout the Cold War. American and European commitments to major alliances have persisted through enormous political turnover.
The crucial variable is institutionalisation. A foreign policy becomes durable when it stops depending entirely on one leader or party and becomes embedded across institutions and political coalitions. Support for Ukraine has been relatively broad across much of Europe, but Slovakia demonstrates that this consensus is not universal.
The challenge for Ukraine is therefore not simply obtaining weapons from the government currently in office. It needs support to become politically resilient enough to survive governments changing.
That is much harder because Kyiv cannot campaign in Slovak elections, and nor should it. Slovak citizens have every right to prioritise their own economic and security preferences. Ukraine’s partners need to make the case domestically.
This is where burden-sharing becomes politically important. Smaller countries can reasonably ask why they should bear large costs if wealthier allies contribute less relative to their capacity. Collective-action problems appear whenever a public good is shared across countries.
Every government benefits if Ukraine remains capable of resisting aggression.
Each government would prefer somebody else pay more for producing that outcome.
NATO and the European Union exist partly to coordinate those incentives. Without coordination, governments can free-ride on the contributions of others. If enough states do so, collective support becomes inadequate even though every state individually preferred the outcome it was supposed to produce.
Slovakia’s size makes its individual military contribution relatively small in the context of total Western support, but its political significance could be larger because precedents change expectations. If one government ends military assistance without suffering major strategic consequences, parties elsewhere sceptical of support can point towards the example.
Hungary already provides one version under Viktor Orbán. Fico could potentially create another.
Two governments do not constitute a European majority. They can complicate institutions requiring consensus and change the perception that support for Ukraine is politically inevitable.
This is why Fico’s victory should neither be exaggerated into “Europe abandoning Ukraine” nor dismissed because Slovakia is small. Coalitions usually weaken at the margins before they collapse at the centre. The relevant question is whether Slovakia represents a national exception or an early example of broader war fatigue.
Economic conditions will influence that answer. If inflation continues falling and European energy markets stabilise, some of the material grievances associated with the war may become less politically salient. If another energy shock occurs or governments enter recession, opposition to costly foreign commitments could grow.
Foreign-policy coalitions therefore depend partly on domestic macroeconomics.
This relationship is often underestimated. Governments separate finance ministries from foreign ministries institutionally, but voters do not. A household experiencing declining real income evaluates international policy through the same budget that pays rent and electricity.
Strategic policy needs an economic foundation.
This is why Western governments should avoid presenting support for Ukraine as though citizens have a moral obligation to accept unlimited costs without explanation. Democratic consent is not an obstacle to strategy. It is one of the resources strategy requires.
Leaders need to specify objectives, costs and plausible end states. What does Ukrainian success mean? How much assistance is required? What risks does continued support reduce? What risks does it create? Under what conditions would negotiations become desirable?
Avoiding those questions because they are politically difficult leaves space for politicians such as Fico to provide simpler answers.
His answer is essentially that Slovakia should stop sending weapons and push for negotiations.
That sounds attractive because negotiation is less costly than war.
The unresolved question is negotiation under what balance of power?
A ceasefire negotiated because Ukraine retains enough military capacity to deny further Russian advances is different from negotiations after Ukrainian defences weaken because assistance disappears. Diplomatic outcomes depend partly on battlefield expectations.
Military support and negotiation are therefore not necessarily opposites.
Weapons can alter the bargaining position from which negotiations occur.
Conversely, military assistance without any plausible political strategy can become an indefinite commitment whose objective gradually becomes unclear.
A serious policy needs both.
Fico’s criticism therefore identifies a legitimate democratic question even if his proposed answer is contestable: how long should support continue and towards what political objective?
Governments supporting Ukraine should be able to answer that without treating the question itself as disloyal.
The democratic advantage over Russia should ultimately be the capacity for open debate and policy correction, not the absence of disagreement.
But open debate also creates vulnerability to manipulation.
Again, democratic strength and democratic weakness emerge from the same institution.
Slovakia’s election demonstrates this tension particularly clearly. Voters can legitimately choose a government that changes foreign policy. That is democratic sovereignty. Other European governments may believe the resulting policy weakens collective security.
Both propositions can be true.
Membership in alliances therefore requires countries voluntarily accepting some constraints on purely national policy because collective security produces benefits no member can generate alone.
The question is how much divergence those institutions can absorb.
Fico has said he does not intend to take Slovakia out of NATO or the European Union. His argument is instead that Slovakia should pursue a more sovereign position within them. That is an important distinction because the emerging challenge to European integration may increasingly come not from governments leaving institutions but from governments remaining inside while contesting the policies those institutions attempt to coordinate.
This is internal multipolarity. The EU can contain governments with significantly different relationships towards Russia, migration, liberal democracy and economic integration while still remaining one political-economic union.
The more diverse those preferences become, the harder collective action becomes.
Yet forcing every member into identical policy would undermine the national democratic sovereignty that gives the union legitimacy in the first place.
European integration therefore lives permanently between coordination and autonomy.
Slovakia is testing that boundary.
The final coalition is not yet known, so Fico’s election victory should not be treated as though every campaign promise has already become government policy. Smer has won the largest share, not a parliamentary majority. Coalition negotiations will determine whether Fico returns to office and how much of his programme he can implement.
That itself reinforces the broader lesson. Elections distribute political power; they do not always produce one complete mandate.
Still, the result sends information.
A substantial share of Slovak voters has supported a party explicitly challenging one of the central foreign-policy consensuses established in Europe after February 2022.
Ukraine’s Western partners should pay attention without assuming those voters are simply pro-Russian.
Some may be.
Others may be economically frustrated, distrustful of the previous government or convinced that negotiations offer a better path.
Understanding the distinction matters because political coalitions are preserved through persuasion, not classification.
The long-term question for Ukraine is therefore becoming clearer. Western countries possess enough combined economic and military resources to support Ukraine for a very long time.
Resource capacity may not be the binding constraint.
Political willingness may be.
Russia understands that.
Ukraine understands that.
European elections will increasingly determine it.
Slovakia is small, but the principle is large: a strategy designed to last years cannot depend on public support that lasts only until the next election.
If the West believes supporting Ukraine is necessary for European security, it has to build a political case capable of surviving democratic turnover.
Otherwise Putin does not need every Western government to change its mind at once.
He only needs to wait for enough elections.
