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. 

The migration of people, money, and companies out of California has evolved into a clear challenge to the economic future of the Golden State. Terrified by the loss of so much revenue — an estimated $91 billion between 2019-23 — the state, as well as other blue outposts, is looking at ways of forcing people to stay. California lawmakers have proposed further targeting of the ultra-rich, but the upper-middle classes are also at heightened risk; like the billionaires, they are seeking to move away to escape the taxman’s grip.

One method to reduce incentives for leaving the state, proposed in the California press this week, is to turn the screw ever more tightly by heavily taxing residents who sell their overpriced homes. In many cases, this could land middle-class people with capital gains liabilities which, in some cases, could be upwards of a million dollars.

This is an attempt to avoid the ramifications of California’s tax and regulatory policies. Since 2020, there has been a steady flow of people — over five million — from Democratic-supporting counties to those which voted for Trump. This weakens blue-state economies, while also threatening their tax base. As other states impose their own wealth taxes, lawmakers are exploring options to make residents pay to leave — a kind of migratory ransom.

The focus on the upper-middle class reflects changes in migration. For years, California primarily shed working-class residents, but this exodus has spread to the educated and affluent, and across all age cohorts. Many of the richest Californians have fled, taking a combined $1 trillion in wealth with them, but the options for the upper-middle classes are not quite so extensive. They might be homeowners who have enjoyed asset growth from the inflation in real estate, but they still lack the millions to move easily to Miami Beach. This group, largely made up of Boomers, constitutes the most lucrative target for tax raisers.

Taking money from these citizens is an appealing strategy for Left-wingers, but such restraints may carry unanticipated impacts. Moves to keep Boomers in the state contribute to the rapid aging of California. Golden State citizens stay in their homes longer than residents of any other US state, while California’s homeowner age has become ever higher compared to the national average. Perhaps most revealing is that California now ranks last in per capita terms for attracting new residents — a remarkable development for a state long powered by youthful newcomers.

Since 2000, more than four million net domestic migrants, a population roughly equivalent to the Seattle metropolitan area, have moved to other parts of the nation from California. The combined impact of these two phenomena — trapped Boomers and fleeing Millennials — helps explain the state’s collapsing fertility rate. Long above the national average, it is now the nation’s 10th-lowest. California’s birth rate more closely resembles that of New England or Florida than prime competitors such as Texas, Florida and Arizona. Los Angeles and San Francisco rank last and second-to-last in birth rates among the 53 major US metropolitan areas.

Once associated with youth culture, Los Angeles County has seen its population under the age of 25 shrink by nearly three-quarters of a million (-19%) since the turn of the millennium. That’s 750,000 people who would have joined the prime-age workforce over the next 25 years. Last year, Los Angeles experienced the largest net population loss in the country. In contrast, cities in Texas, Utah, Idaho and Arizona have enjoyed double-digit growth among this same cohort over the past two decades. The pay-off for young migrants is clear: those who move gain an average of $600 a month in income once they leave.

Ultimately, trapping the Boomers will only accelerate California’s rapid aging and reduced workforce. Attempts to make it difficult for them to cash out may seem like social justice to the neo-socialists who increasingly dominate the Democratic Party in California. But this approach will leave the state ill-equipped to fend off competition from red states that increasingly attract the young and ambitious — precisely the people who drove California for so long.

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Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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