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 don’t think there’s a farmer alive who’s Labour anymore,” celebrity petrolhead turned agricultural champion Jeremy Clarkson told Times Radio earlier this week.

Dramatic stuff, although it does raise the question of how many Labour-supporting farmers there were in the first place. The extinction of the dinosaurs was significant because they once ruled the world. Farmers who vote Labour, meanwhile, have long been a tiny minority. Though the most recent Farmers Weekly Sentiment Survey, published in January, found just 1% support for Labour among the group, this collapse came from the towering peak of… 4% at the last general election.

Paper after paper has been produced on “Labour’s Rural Problem”, a turn of phrase coined by Angela Eagle in a 2015 report that has defined all the party’s subsequent faltering efforts at countryside reconnection. “Rural” does not, however, necessarily mean “farming”. Despite its torrid years of rural rejection and 4% support among farmers, Labour managed to win 135 rural and semi-rural seats in 2024. A bright new dawn for red rosettes on country lanes appeared to be at hand.

Or not. Earlier this year, More in Common produced an MRP poll that predicted a rural wipeout for Labour. A generational opportunity for an electoral reset has seemingly been squandered in less than two years. The pollster chalked the countryside collapse up to the same issues vexing the rest of the country, but noted one vital accelerant to the bonfire of Labour support: the imposition of the family farm tax. Farmers may not deliver the rural vote singlehandedly, but farming is a totemic issue in the countryside, a signal of a Government’s priorities.

More in Common also pointed to the beneficiaries of the Labour retreat, the “formidable advance” of Reform UK. The latest Farmers Weekly Sentiment Survey found that backing for Reform had shot up from 15% in 2024 to 40% by the end of 2025, with Tory support falling from 57% to 28%. Clarkson made the same observation. Historically, the great majority of those votes could be expected to flow to the Conservative Party, yet Clarkson says the farmers he knows, particularly younger ones, are turning to Nigel Farage.

To an extent, this is likely an extension of the “ordinary voter” rule formulated this week by Labour MP Connor Naismith, commenting on trade-unionist support for Reform. Naismith is not surprised, because trade unionists are “normal working people”, and right now “normal working people” are clearly opting for Reform. The same is apparently true of farmers, probably more so because farmers are historically small-c conservative and Reform is at present the ascendant Right-wing party.

Another factor, as true for farmers as for everyone else, is the baggage of 14 years of Conservative government. The Tories carry with them the whiff of failure to deliver a post-Brexit settlement that works for farmers. The muddle-headed attempt to replace European Union payments with a system that rewarded environmental efforts, while negotiating trade deals with New Zealand and Australia, was characterized at the time as raising standards at home while lowering standards overseas.

So while young farmers feel personally targeted by Labour’s inheritance tax, which threatens their ability to take over their family farms, this uncertainty did not hit a farming sector confident in its own future. Farming was already suffering economic shocks, workforce issues and broken supply chains, for which many farmers lay the blame at the Tory door.

Reform UK is shiny and new, with no record to defend. No record, that is, other than Brexit itself. In 2023, a different Farmers Weekly survey found that 69% of farmers were “counting the cost of Brexit”, noting a negative impact on their business. Brexit is baked into the Reform brand, and while many farmers can look past this, some might view farmers climbing aboard the Farage train as akin to turkeys voting for Christmas.

A clean sweep of the farming community is therefore far from inevitable for Reform. Various agricultural woes stem from a Brexit many see as mishandled, though one thing we learned from the 2016 referendum is that appeals to economic pragmatism don’t fare well against campaigns that speak to the heart.

People often assume farmers will always “follow the money”, but there is a cultural thickness around agriculture that insulates it from utilitarian argument yet makes it hungry for rhetoric that honors the efforts of British farmers to feed the nation. Right now, Reform is winning that rhetorical battle with a patriotic, pro-farming message.

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Liam Stokes is a writer and environmentalist.

LNJStokes

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