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’s confirmed: Andy Burnham has crap taste in London pubs. Asked by the London Standard for his favorite, he chose The Dog House, a Punch pub in Kennington; pressed by Time Out for more, he added The Chandos, a Samuel Smith’s by Trafalgar Square, and The Barking Dog, a now-closed Wetherspoons in Barking. It’s hardly a tour of London’s idiosyncratic institutions. His reasons for these choices are revealing: Everton away days at The Chandos, a single “memorable” night at The Barking Dog, and The Dog House was where he and his wife held their 30th birthday, but Time Out also noted that Morrissey was once a regular there. This is, one suspects, his real reason.

For a politician who rarely takes a breath without spewing guff about pride in every postcode, this is a remarkably shallow relationship with a city where he worked and lived for 25 years. Burnham further said that it is a “myth” he is anti-London and claimed: “I don’t think there’s a pub in London I’ve not been in.” To the Standard, he said Londoners were “spoiled”.

But irritatingly, Burnham is right. Pubs probably are the one shining light in London’s increasingly terrible nightlife. Nightclubs close or return as private members’ clubs; bars increasingly resemble those in Dubai or Singapore, with the same cocktails, kitten-heeled table service and identikit menus of globally-appealing picky bits. Restaurants demand bookings and two-hour sittings; even a casual drink can involve surrendering your credit card details before sitting down. A pub remains one of the few places where you can turn up without a plan, make friends with a stranger and wake up with a wretched hangover.

And when Burnham calls pubs “the beating heart of our communities” he is close to the truth. You find a community smoking fags in beer gardens, just as you find them praying on their knees in churches, but both are places where community becomes visible, not what creates it.

So we get Burnham’s revealed preferences. He calls pubs “heritage”, yet his examples are one pub from an estate of 1,300, one Wetherspoons of 800, and one Samuel Smith’s of 200. And while pubs remain a refuge from the rest of London nightlife, plenty are going down the same homogenized route as bars and restaurants.

So ancient boozers become sticky-floored saloons serving freezer-fried food and whichever handpulled ale the chain has secured at scale. Others turn into table-service cocktail bars with wainscoting. Once the landlord lived upstairs; now you would be lucky to see the same faces behind the bar for six months.

It is not as though the old pub was paradise. Go back to the Seventies, before the “40 years of neoliberal failure” Burnham talks about, and many were grim. My father remembers Dirty Dicks near Liverpool Street as being smoke-filled, with sawdust underfoot for spilled beer, gobs of spit and the occasional bit of vomit. Some pubs still divided men and women into separate rooms; lunch might amount to a curling sandwich oxidizing beneath a glass dome, or a murky jar of pickled onions.

Nor was this some misty age of independent publicans. In 1971, roughly 52,000 of Britain’s 75,000 pubs were brewery-owned. Margaret Thatcher’s 1989 Beer Orders tried to break the Big Six brewers’ grip; instead the sell-offs helped create the modern pubco, replacing one form of corporate control that brewed beer with another that didn’t.

Burnham is right about his diagnosis, but his choices are suspicious. He talks grandly about “heritage”, “working-class culture”, and pubs as community institutions, while being relaxed about whether pubs retain anything local or distinctive after the investment managers have had their say, or the company becomes a PLC. He has even warned that “once pubs are gone they don’t come back”, which is ironic considering Wetherspoons plans to reopen his beloved Barking Dog.

If these interviews were an orchestrated attempt to dispel Burnham’s anti-London association, they’re not convincing. Three chain pubs, Morrissey trivia and an Everton anecdote reveal his shallow relationship with not just London, but pubs as well.