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 know anyone who uses Threads. Perhaps you don’t, either. Yet, according to new data from analytics firm Similarweb, the Meta app now attracts more daily users than Elon Musk’s X — at least on mobile. As of 7 January this year, Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android, whereas X had 125 million.

If the data is accurate — and tracking social media numbers can be something of a dark art — then it tells us important truths about the current social media landscape. The first is never to rely solely on one’s own network for a sense of where the internet is heading. But perhaps the most important takeaway from the rise of Threads is that critics underestimate Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta at their peril.

Threads was created, in part, to troll Musk. As the Tesla founder made his new ownership felt with sweeping changes at Twitter in 2022, Zuckerberg turned to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri to quickly build and launch a rival.

The platform has had its ups and downs since launching in 2023, as an initial influx of 30 million users failed to translate into repeat customers. But Meta has not lost faith. It singled out the app by name as one of its top priorities for 2025 in its most recent annual report. Rolling out new features and pushing Threads content into the feeds of Facebook and Instagram users appears to have worked. It should hardly be a surprise: Meta’s products are used by 3.5 billion people every day, and that reach can be leveraged for almost anything.

While X might feel like a big deal for the twittering classes, it’s long been orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook and Instagram — even in the US, its biggest market. Its relative popularity in certain countries, including the UK, also distracts from the global picture. People are more likely to be using TikTok, YouTube, or China’s everything-app WeChat than they are to be on X.

Numbers aren’t everything, of course. X remains a place where influential people in politics, business and media shape the discourse. Its content lives a second life in screenshots circulated on Instagram accounts and Reddit forums. Who ever heard of a meme originating on Threads? Where Musk’s team may need to worry, though, is if the platform continues to bleed more of these tastemakers.

For now, they are helped by the splintered state of the social media landscape. Even though there are only a handful of social media platforms with scale, owned by even fewer companies, the actual user experience can feel disparate. Users dissatisfied with X, for example, have a vast array of competitors with text-based feeds to choose from, including Threads, BlueSky, Substack Notes, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

The competition can be exciting; it can also be exhausting. People frequently leave X, proudly proclaiming they will be using Bluesky instead, only to essentially drop off the face of public social media. The effort of rebuilding the social networks which give these platforms value is often too great.

This is where the warm embrace of the Meta “family” — as it calls its app collection — can be hard to resist. When a new user joins Threads, they can choose to automatically follow everyone on the new app whom they already follow on Instagram. Digital connections remain intact, and there’s almost a “devil you know” attitude towards Zuckerberg. If Threads continues to grow, it may be able to capitalise on the impression that it has “won” the battle to be the go-to X alternative, triggering another exodus of those who are still waiting to jump.

Dissatisfaction with X may look like an opportunity for smaller competitors to emerge but, as things stand, it looks to be benefiting an even bigger social media company.