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. 

Celebrity chefs are easily recognizable from a few select attributes. Julia Child had a homely warble to her tone. Gordon Ramsay has his swearing. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr has a husky voice and stories about the Saltonstall-Kennedy fisheries Act. No, that last one is not a mistake: RFK Jr is now an unlikely presenter, gracing our YouTube feeds to promote the United States Department of Health and Human Services food pyramid and other policies.

Kennedy’s new Real Food Show opens with his aim: to get Americans to eat real, good, nutritious and affordable food. Fine. His partner for episode one is Andrew Gruel, a California city councilor, chef, Fox News personality and self-described “seafood junkie”, there to prepare a salmon dish for under $5 per person. So far, so unexciting.

They’ve set themselves a big challenge. We’re told that the average American, especially children, is “addicted” to ultra-processed foods (UPFs), and that, understandably, this needs to change. The presenters vow there will be no “chef tricks” and “nothing intellectual”, and that by the end viewers will be “addicted” to “sticky” fishcakes instead. But it’s not long before the whole thing derails.

Gruel, supposedly a seafood specialist, overcooks the salmon twice. He’s shown on camera oiling the wrong side, with an autopsy of dry salmon scraps sitting devastated in a tray, and insists that it doesn’t matter if it’s this badly overdone. Next, he mystifyingly informs viewers that he had to leave university due to his diet; after trying antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, he says he cured himself by cutting seed oils out of his food. And despite promising no “chef tricks”, he provides a lesson in how to sharpen a knife. The only problem? He does so over the food they are about to eat. Yum: a garnish of steel shards, anyone?

Before the 20 torturous minutes are up, the presenters have discussed omega-3s and -6s, the evils of pasta, carbon steel pans and the crushing cost of salad dressing, as well as making a fairly good joke about child slave labor. They also construct a grim salad, and when Kennedy rather uncomfortably tastes all this, he turns to Gruel — creepily staring at the camera — and gives him a thumbs up, before the episode ends abruptly.

As diverting as it is to rubberneck a car crash, it remains perplexing who this is meant to be for. There is some standard political point-scoring: Joe Biden’s food pyramid was 453 pages long, and its “mercantile impulses put fruit loops at the top” of it, so instead Kennedy locked some experts in a room for 11 months, and their bright idea was to flip the pyramid upside down. But why would someone desperately addicted to Krispy Kreme and Subway then start making their own vinaigrette?

If Kennedy wants to break the grip of UPFs, he needs much more than a YouTube show. Showing viewers a pyramid, no matter how upside down it is, won’t convince them of the virtues of a good diet. Almost no one seriously designs their meals in the way public health experts hope they do: around ratios, food groups and micronutrients. We have an instinctual understanding of what we enjoy eating, how to balance things sensibly, and how not to overindulge. You must taste things, enjoy them, and want more of them, rather than whipping out a spreadsheet to get a certain percentage of protein versus “vegetal”, which can only lead to the crime of a white bean, apple, and arugula salad with a mustard dressing. It’s thin gruel from Gruel.

Put another way: if you woke up and saw Yvette Cooper, the new UK Health Secretary, cooking a seafood paella on Sunday Brunch, would you be inspired? Nobody wants that. She would be rightly told to stick to the day job. And that’s exactly what RFK Jr should do.