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. 

It appears that Gen Z is not just nostalgic for the fashion trends of the early 2000s, but the internet ones too. Reddit, the online discussion platform, has now overtaken TikTok as Britain’s fourth most visited social media service. The platform has grown significantly in the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches.

This is in part due to search engine algorithms, which now prioritise helpful content from discussion forums, but also shifting internet habits in young people: Reddit is now the sixth most visited organisation by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. I started using it for the first time last year, finding humour and helpful advice while scrolling late at night in the newborn trenches.

In many respects, Reddit’s growing popularity should come as a surprise. It is utilitarian, unaesthetic and decidedly unglamorous. It prioritises text-based information over video entertainment. It is much more “old-fashioned” in that it resembles the small, community-run forums of the early internet, dedicated to communication rather than content creation.

Yet these are also precisely the reasons why it may appeal to a younger audience. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Reddit is the worst form of social media except for all the other forms that have been tried. Instagram mixes self-promotion and brainless short-form videos; Facebook is full of outrage and misinformation; and Twitter/X, once the “digital town square”, is now like a school playground where the bullies and bots have taken over. All three have become a concentrated sludge of conspiracy theories, violence, porn, spam, trolls, scams and AI.

Reddit, on the other hand, still feels human. Users follow general topics of interest rather than people. Comments are confined to individual subreddits, so there’s little impetus to come up with the most extreme or controversial take. There’s also none of the incessant drone to like, follow or subscribe that you find elsewhere. Everyone is anonymous, so there’s no need to worry about one’s “personal brand” or appealing to the algorithm, and attacks are less likely to be deeply personal as a result.

There are also multiple layers of moderation. There are Reddit admins (platform-level staff who handle site-wide policy enforcement); automatic moderating tools; volunteer moderators; and then the users themselves, who are able to upvote and downvote comments, making them more or less visible. They aren’t perfect — unpaid moderators are overworked, and many believe they are inconsistent or too heavy-handed — but these human-centric layers of protection make Reddit feel remarkably more “safe” than the Wild West of Meta or X. Just this week, Elon Musk’s AI “Grok” was criticised for allowing users to digitally undress photos of women without their consent.

While the site is hardly free of bots, Reddit’s growing success is a timely reminder that people want human-generated information, advice, reviews and opinions. Big Tech is constantly looking forward — consider Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with creating the Metaverse, a world that no one really asked for and no one really wants. Perhaps it should start looking back to the past.

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Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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