Page 58 - bne_Magazine_March_2018

58 Opinion
bne March 2018
Growing differentiation
Thirdly, Hungary and Poland are likely to find their diplomatic position weakening this year as their disputes with Brussels escalate, and Slovakia and Czechia try to differentiate themselves more and more from their unpopular populist neighbours.
New Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki seems to have been selected by the country’s real ruler Kaczynski as a way of dialling down tensions with Brussels, but so far this has not worked. So long as Kaczynski regards playing to the domestic gallery – like the recent Holocaust bill– as more important than building bridges with the West, his prime minister is
in an impossible position.
Orban, by contrast, has every interest in dialling up the tensions with Brussels, as he seeks a third consecutive term in April elections.
Both countries are being investigated by Brussels and, whether or not the EU is finally ready to take action, the disputes are set to poison relations all year.
Orban may back down after the election – as he has done many times before – but it hard to see Kaczynski doing the same, even if his domestic political position looks impregnable before the 2019 general election.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has played along with Orban and Kaczynski to shore up his domestic support, whipping up Islamophobia and lambasting the EU. But last year he began to increasingly differentiate himself from his two neighbours as their relations with Brussels worsened and the debate about the future of the EU started in earnest.
This is probably partly tactical. The Slovak parliamentary opposition is an unattractive hodgepodge of Eurosceptics, populists and neo-Nazis. Fico may be hoping to consolidate the country’s largely pro-EU voters behind his Smer party, or at least secure their tolerance as the least worst option.
Given the difficulty he will have to form a workable coalition, he may also be thinking about his legacy. Putting Slovakia
in the EU core would fit nicely. He is visibly exhausted after dominating Slovak politics for more than a decade and reportedly underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 2016.
He appears to be looking for a way out and there has even been speculation that Fico harbours an ambition to take a senior post in the Commission. This would enable him to gracefully exit the bear pit of Slovak politics, after a failed bid for the job as president in 2014. In a Central Europe where attention seeking populists such as Orban dominate the political scene, it might not take much to be embraced by the EU like a prodigal son.
Slovakia’s anti-immigrant stance was as much rhetoric as substance. With little fanfare, Fico temporarily took in migrants from Austria. By accepting a few dozen
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migrants under the quota scheme, Slovakia avoided the EU infringement procedure inflicted on its V4 neighbours.
Slovakia already qualifies to be at the heart of the EU as the only member of the V4 that in the Eurozone. Fico has also explicitly stated that if it came to the crunch, he would choose the EU over his V4 neighbours. As he said last June, “either we get in the integration express or we’ll be stuck in the depot on the second track”. In October the Slovak president, premier and parliamentary speaker joined forces to endorse this drive.
“What we want is to have a chance to be part of the EU core and keep good relations with the V4,” says a former Slovak ambassador, who adds that the country will continue to try
“It is going to be hard to forge serious co-operation between Austria and Hungary”
to act as a bridge between the V4 and Brussels. “We don’t see it as something mutually exclusive; in fact we see it the other way round, as something mutually supportive.” But the problem with bridges is people walk all over them. As the smallest and youngest V4 member, and the only one now led by the left, being a bridge may become an increasingly difficult role for Slovakia to play, eventually pushing it to prioritise its relations with the EU core.
Hungary and Poland may find Czechia a less pliable partner in the future, despite the election of billionaire populist Andrej Babis. His predecessor, Social Democrat Bohuslav Sobotka, meekly followed Orban’s lead on migration because he feared that doing otherwise would be a gift to rivals.
The centre-left government seemed to almost court the EU infringement procedure on migrant quotas by refusing to take in any new refugees at all.
If Babis is finally able to form a majority government, perhaps with Social Democrat backing, he will be in a much stronger position to take a purely pragmatic approach to the issue.
A coalition with the far right Freedom and Direct Democracy Party or the Communists, with re-elected President Milos Zeman exerting more influence on foreign policy, would, however, be a very different matter.
Babis constantly voices criticism of Brussels, and has praised the V4, but he would be ready to change his position at the drop of a hat if he saw electoral advantage in it. He may try to keep triangulating between Brussels and the V4, but Fico’s shift West will make it increasingly difficult for him to cover both bases and could leave him exposed. Babis is visibly enjoying strutting on the European stage and he would not want to exchange that for skulking on the fringes.