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. 

Sometime in 2010, in my twenties, a Canadian HR manager tried to convince me that I’d find the meaning of life in the Nevada desert. She was a ‘Burner’, and Burning Man festival was the solution. There were ski goggles, silly hats, experimental music, and a black cat called Moop, named after the festival’s matter-out-of-place principle. I ran a mile after the cringeworthy group hug sessions and drunken lectures to take my trash home with me. I was and remain too English to belong to this particular group identity.

Yet the Burners may have been onto something: they felt that a festival is a vessel for identity, something to join rather than simply attend. While most festivals have tried to copy Burning Man, many of them are now in trouble.

Most recently, this summer’s Womad Glasgow was canceled. It was set to be the first Scottish edition of Peter Gabriel’s world-music festival, but sold too few of its £145 tickets to go ahead. It joins a list kept by the Association of Independent Festivals of 20 cancellations or postponements so far this year. Womad’s trouble was partly geography: a festival frequented by people who live in the South of England, that has now moved too far away. The usual suspects are also blamed: big corporate beasts suffocating the little guy, and the fees that some musicians charge. But is this really the death of music festivals?

Not exactly. The numbers show a bubble deflating after Covid, with 43 closures in 2025 and 78 the year before, the slow unwinding of a glut funded by cheap money and more disposable income. Even if it’s just a correction, something is still being lost. A festival used to be a simple thing: a field, a sound system, a love of a subculture, and a few thousand strangers misbehaving. It did not need to have grand ideas. That was rather the point.

Slowly, however, they have acquired lofty visions — and a price tag to match. When Rage Against The Machine headlined at Coachella in 1999, tickets cost $50 and the band returned half their fee to help the organizers out. Then the need for more money immediately led to the introduction of VIP tickets. Perhaps desperate for relevance while the audience preened, this year The Strokes showed a video montage of US bombings in Iran, a year after Kneecap used their set to call for a “free Palestine”. Coachella tickets now cost $650.

Similarly in the UK, Glastonbury (£375) started as a rock festival but is now mostly pop for middle-class people who want to muck in for a weekend, but at least the wellies serve a practical purpose. Meanwhile, Mighty Hoopla (£160) in Brockwell Park is seen as the ‘gay Glastonbury’, and everyone wears gold or silver lamé shorts.

The decline of Burning Man ($550) shows where this road ends. What began in 1986 as a beach bonfire with no rules or brand guidelines was ruined by guardrails. The original free-spirited principles of the Burner community became bureaucratized, and what was casual and spontaneous became a prescription. Last year the festival made a loss.

Womad and the 19 other casualties this year were never as big as some of those famous festivals, but they all suffer from similar problems: an obsession with planning led by outward appearances, the politicization of everything, the demands of modern laws and regulations, residents getting better at blocking events, and a changing wider culture.

It’s not that it’s good that some festivals are closing, or that organizers are losing money. Their retreat shows how culture has shrunk. What we should return to is smaller, more nimble, unbranded, and perhaps more lawless occasions.