Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

Manhattan, New York City

As the sun set over Lower Manhattan last night, a photo of the late Ali Khamenei stood beneath Washington Square Arch — a place normally packed with NYU art students, vagrants, and far too many rats — beside one of George Floyd. Another display exhibited Khamenei, his predecessor, Khomeini, and the Sixties CIA-deposed Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba on a table of roses. “Down with US imperialism” and “Iran’s missiles will reply,” chanted the demonstrators, behind a makeshift barricade and a cadre of NYPD officers.

This was the “vigil and community iftar for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and all martyrs of Amerikan imperialism” (“Amerika,” as opposed to America, apparently signals the activists’ rejection of “white settler-colonialism.”) The protesters — clad in intimidating face masks and keffiyehs — proudly flew numerous flags of the Islamic Republic. They ranged in age, some older, but the loudest were in their twenties: many of Arab descent, while others were girls who could have stepped straight out of Bushwick. There was also a large banner of Khamenei himself, while one of the “mourners” carried a display of the Israeli flag in which the Star of David had been replaced with the face of Jeffrey Epstein. (Many, certainly this crop of anti-Zionists, believe the Jewish financier-pervert acted as a Mossad spy.)

This was, in other words, the full expression of the Palestinian omnicause, which, since October 7, 2023, has permeated American life: from elite institutions (my own university, Columbia, among the most visible examples) to electoral politics (with “The Palestine News Network” harassing Capitol Hill interns and asking whether they are “America First or Israel First”), and even into debates about ICE and environmentalism — domestic issues reframed as part of the Palestinian struggle. It was not enough for these protesters to be merely opposed to the Iran War. Instead, the Ayatollah, a tyrannical and murderous leader, was praised because he was part of the anti-Israel “resistance”.

Clashing with pro-Israel, pro-Trump, and pro-Pahlavi counter-protesters — a mix of diasporic Iranians, Zionist Jews, and others — one activist proclaimed bluntly, and gleefully: “I don’t give a fuck about Americans. I’m Native. They’re bombing Israel and I like that.” Others on the pro-Ayatollah side shouted at the monarchist Iranians: “You’re not fucking American” and “Go back to Iran — we don’t want you here.” One Iranian woman — perhaps the only one among them — was dressed entirely in black, with only her face visible, resembling a khale chadori (female religious police). This woman screeched at her compatriots: “Saket sho!” (Be quiet!).

While the monarchists jubilantly sang “Javid Shah, Javid Shah, Javid Shah,” with placards displaying Iran’s last Shah, another declaring the Shah’s Maryland-residing son, Reza, the “king”. Their more controversial displays included a vulgar cartoon of Khamenei and a sign suggesting the pro-Ayotallah demonstrators should have been deported. They denounced the supporters of the Islamic Republic as “terrorists, terrorists,” and at times chanted: “Trump, Trump, Trump,” “Bibi, Bibi, Bibi,” and “Pahlavi bar meegardeh” (“Pahlavi will return”). That is, despite the fact that the president has on multiple occasions appeared apprehensive about that very possibility.

As the sky darkened and the temperature fell, I paused between the two camps. On the one hand, activists so absorbed in a “pro-Palestinian” subculture that they seemed detached from the most basic norms of behavior. On the other, monarchists who were oblivious to the calamity of war, awaiting a mythical US-Israeli savior and the sudden return of the long-vanished Pahlavi dynasty.

It was a strange tableau of America in 2026: rival diasporas and imported grievances colliding beneath a triumphal arch built to celebrate the Republic. In a weird kind of way, the scene felt less like a protest than a staging ground for the performance of other people’s “revolutions.”

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Nikos Mohammadi is a student at Columbia University.

NikosMohammadi

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