A month before Viktor Orbán’s widely anticipated defeat on April 12, the question of his successor as leader of the nationalist movement in Central Europe was already a matter of public debate in the region. On March 8, Robert Fico, prime minister of neighboring Slovakia, declared his country “ready to take over the baton from Hungary.” But it isn’t, and it won’t. Although Orbán spent years trying to develop a political network that could outlast him — forming open alliances, funding nationalistic think tanks and media initiatives — he leaves the stage with no viable successor or bloc to pick up his mantle. Just look at Patriots for Europe, the group Orbán formed with populist Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and members of Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party in June of 2024. Though it has grown to be the third-largest voting bloc in the European Parliament, seeking to become a pan-European political party, Orbán’s pro-Russian project has vanished. At the group’s April 18 rally in Milan, hosted by Italy’s far-right Lega party and attended by European nationalists from several countries, there was little evidence of what had long been Orbán’s core project: a regional pivot away from Brussels and toward the Kremlin. When Matteo Salvini, head of the Lega and Italy’s deputy prime minister, praised the Hungarian strongman and urged, “Let us all continue the fight for freedom and the rule of law together!”, he did not mention any cultural and political alliance with Russia. Nor does the issue seem to interest Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s National Rally party and the president of Patriots for Europe. Should Bardella become the next president of France (a possibility), he is unlikely to put any stress on Russia. While Orbán gambled on an anti-Ukrainian message, being associated with Vladimir Putin’s war is now a big vote loser in Western Europe. Ditto the Euro-MAGA message that was a basic element of the populist right for years. Right-wing parties across Europe took note of how Donald Trump , JD Vance and Marco Rubio seem to have harmed Orbán’s final campaign, and have concluded that Trump is electoral poison. It is easy to see why. While anti-European Union parties are fine with Trump’s attacks on the alliance, they resent his insulting attacks on individual NATO members as weak and cowardly. In Europe, YouGov surveys show that negative views of Trump are in the 80%-90% range. (The lowest score, 94% negative versus 3% positive, was achieved in Denmark, thanks to his Greenland remarks.) He leaves the stage with no viable successor or bloc to pick up his mantle. Slovakia’s Fico might look like the closest thing to a leader still willing to rhetorically position themself as part of a Trump-Putin new world order. But scratch the surface, and the reality is one of pragmatism rather than ideology.
Despite having a relationship with the Catholic Church — not surprising for a country that is 60% Roman Catholic — Fico has never tried to posture as a Christian nationalist. And, unlike Orbán, he has never demonized Ukraine or Volodymyr Zelensky. His policy toward the Kremlin is guided by one fact: 100% of Slovakia’s gas and oil comes from Russia. Its energy infrastructure was installed during the Soviet era, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
This dependence means that his government — like others in the region — does not have the luxury of taking a violently anti-Russian position. But nor is it inclined to take a violently pro-Russian one. In fact, there is little support in the country for any extremist position on anything. This is reflected in government policy. While Fico’s party, SMER, was in talks with the Patriots for Europe, it never joined. Its position on most things is ambiguous, and when it comes to Ukraine, it is more anti-war than pro-Putin.
Fico’s government has been in power, on and off, since 2006, and since 2023 has provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine, while also taking the position that EU policy only prolongs the bloody conflict. This doesn’t mean that Fico or his government supports Russia’s invasion. Speaking in Bratislava on April 11, he described it as “a gross violation of international law” (echoing his comments about America’s attack on Venezuela). If Slovakia is Russia’s political Plan B after Viktor Orbán’s Hungary … it is a flawed one. The one issue that dominates the thinking of all the countries in the region is the reopening of the Druzhba pipeline that runs from Russia across Ukraine. It has been closed for a little over a year after both Ukraine and Russia attacked pumping stations, and the Central Europeans think Zelensky is dragging his heels about reopening it, especially as he has said that he would prefer to keep it closed. On April 16, Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár said that Slovakia needs clear, transparent and verifiable guarantee of the pipeline’s reactivation as a mandatory condition for supporting the EU’s 20th sanctions package against Russia, but that the government has no objection to granting Ukraine a proposed 90 billion-euro loan, mainly for armaments, something Orbán was doing his best to sabotage. (On April 23, the pipeline started delivering crude to Slovakia and Hungary again, and it was announced that the EU’s loan to Ukraine could proceed.) It is hard to see how this amounts to a pro-Russian position, though in other areas, like attending Victory Day parades in Moscow, Fico has gone further than any other European leader to present himself as a friend of Russia. He is a pragmatic politician. He has met with Trump, but also with Barack Obama. A report from Euractiv on his attendance at the CPAC conference in February 2025 described him as “known for his pro-Russian policies and frequent repetition of Kremlin narratives,” but he has consistently supported Ukrainian membership in the EU. If Slovakia is Russia’s political Plan B after Viktor Orbán’s Hungary — “The weakest link in influencing the European Union,” in the words of retired Lt. Gen. Jan Beroun, a former head of Czech military intelligence — it is a flawed one. Slovakia is a multiparty democracy, and Fico’s party, SMER, with only 17% of the vote, is part of a fragile coalition and is currently trailing the liberal, pro-European Progressive Slovakia (or PS) party, which is polling at 20%. It has nothing like the mass public support enjoyed by Orbán in Hungary for many years.
In Slovakia and other former Eastern Bloc countries, the feeling toward the EU and NATO is often contradictory: The public wants the good bits but not the inconvenient parts, and resents being bullied by Western Europe — especially when it comes to supporting a war at their doorstep that brings them no benefits but cuts off their supplies of fuel. While the Baltic states and Poland fear that Russia will target them next, no such fear animates politics in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary or Bulgaria. This leads some of them, including Fico in Slovakia, to take positions that some in the West consider too friendly to Russia. But Viktor Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, pro-MAGA cheerleading is already just a memory. The Kremlin will continue to try to leverage individuals and institutions where it can, but abandoning Trump is looking good for everyone in Europe, including the extreme right, and that includes abandoning Trump’s pro-Kremlin attitude.
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