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. 

“I’m at my family place at the moment.” I hit on this combination of words a couple of years ago. It sounded — I hoped it sounded — sophisticated and cosmopolitan, as if I was referring to surfing an extensive collection of properties rather than what I actually meant: living with my parents. A couple of weeks shy of my 29th birthday, I finally moved out and broke a spell of several years there.

But many guys my age haven’t managed it. According to new data from the Office of National Statistics, 35% of men in the UK aged 20 to 35 were living with their parents last year, an increase from 26% in 2000. One might think this is all part and parcel of our roiling housing-market apocalypse, but the figure for young women of the same age is just 22%.

This is not just a trifling difference: young men are nearly 60% more likely to live with their parents than young women. As if being afflicted by poor mental health and the siren calls of manosphere influencers weren’t enough, guys also have to contend with dodging their mom on the stairs after they come home from a session.

Some of this is based on appreciable material trends. British women are starting to put the gender pay gap into reverse. In 2022, three women enrolled in university for every two men. Among Brits aged between 21 and 26, women now have a slightly higher median income than men.

To this, we can add that men are simply less social than women — some research even suggests that roughly a quarter of men have no close friends at all. Men will happily sit in their bedroom and molder into misanthropy rather than head off into the bright, wide world like their sisters. Even those who aren’t shut-ins might, if they’re living in an expensive city, simply not have enough friends to facilitate flat-sharing. Then there’s the daunting reality of actually living with strangers from flat shares in big cities. Anyone who’s run the gauntlet of sites like SpareRoom will know there are far worse fates than bumping into a neighbor who knew you at 13 while leaving the house on your way to work.

All these stay-at-home sons illuminate an underappreciated fact: modern male online culture is strikingly passive. Looksmaxxing, for instance, valorizes external, set beauty standards to a degree that would make the worst caricature of female vanity blush. By its “total, physical capitulation to the internet”, John Paul Brammer recently wrote in Playboy, it’s a “radically submissive movement”.

Or how about “monitoring the situation”, whether that means the Iran war or the global financial markets. It’s not about getting out into the world; it’s about sitting in a room and reading tweets. And why not make that room your childhood bedroom? A 2024 Ofcom report into Generation-Z social media habits found that all of the platforms associated with real-life networks of friends — Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook — were dominated by women. Sites where you are more likely to interact with people you don’t know and consume strangers’ content, such as X, Reddit and YouTube, were male-dominated.

To be sure, men get into fits of anxiety about being passive — hence the rise of an influencer culture which plays on that anxiety. But when confronted with a choice — leave the nest, or not — their inaction tells its own story.

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Josiah Gogarty is a writer at British GQ.

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