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. 

There’s a price to be paid when common sense is sacrificed at the altar of political activism. That’s the hard reality the writer Nikole Hannah-Jones — or really, her daughter Najya — is facing, according to her recent New York Times Magazine article. A decade ago, Hannah-Jones announced that she would purposefully send her child to a “mostly low-income and Black school” to combat education inequality. But it was her daughter who suffered the consequences.

Najya faced academic neglect at these schools. She was misled about her actual abilities through inflated grades. She did not receive the appropriate support she needed to flourish. And this was all too predictable, given that Hannah-Jones knowingly chose a struggling public school. Her husband initially worried about putting their daughter at a disadvantage. Najya, upon learning her parents had the resources to send her to a good school, felt betrayed: “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Hannah-Jones’s article is brutally honest about the reality inside American schools. But despite seeing all the problems in front of her, the writer still walks away with the wrong lessons. She blames what she considers “segregation” as the reason for the problems in Najya’s schools.

Her argument assumes that affluence, and perhaps even race, determines which students will simply be bestowed with better educational opportunities and which will always be at a disadvantage. Hannah-Jones misses the fact that schools serving disadvantaged students are also capable of providing an excellent education. The law already prohibits schools from excluding children based on race. The problems are actually the very ones she describes.

The first inconvenient reality is that schools sacrifice order and fairness when they do everything to acquiesce to disruptive kids. At one of the schools, teachers spent much time responding to misbehaving students. For students like Najya who were trying to do their work, it felt unfair to watch teachers devote so much time to dealing with disruptive behaviors. The presence of disorder also makes room for other problems, such as schools struggling to attract high-quality teachers. This was a persistent problem Najya faced, as her schools often had staff who failed to do their basic jobs of supervising or teaching students.

This leads to a second inconvenient reality: many schools mislead students about their capabilities by doling out A’s and reducing rigor. Najya had received high grades in her algebra class, but failed the state exam. This became such a repeated pattern that she “developed testing anxiety”.

But here’s where the third inconvenient reality comes in. Testing anxiety may be more of a sign of under-preparation than of something being wrong with the test. Students are frequently told that poor performance can be dismissed because the assessment is meaningless or because they might just be bad test-takers. But in this case, the repeated pattern of poor test results became too difficult to explain away. And it turned out that after enrolling in algebra tutoring, Najya was struggling with foundational math skills such as fractions and long division.

Many of the problems that Hannah-Jones identifies can be addressed regardless of race. Najya eventually passed the state algebra exam once the math deficiencies were addressed. Schools should maintain high academic standards. To achieve this, they should also maintain order and safety.

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Neetu Arnold is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Young Voices contributor. Follow her on X @neetu_arnold

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