By Sean Hanley, University College London.

This contribution is drawn from an article written by Sean Hanley on his webiste. Be sure to subscribe to it if you want to be informed of his future contributions and to support his work.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was a slightly unexpected new addition to yesterday’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. US conservative and MAGA audiences have long embraced Hungary’s national-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a poster boy for the kind of authoritarian change they seek in the US. Czechia’s mercurial billionaire populist Andrej Babiš has also thrown in his lot with Orbán’s Patriots for Europe alliance and has appeared at a CPAC regional events in Budapest.

But Fico — who has always positioned himself as a tough, socially conservative Central European social democrat — was perhaps the most obvious new figure at yesterday’s Trump-fest in Washington. Socially conservative and nationalist thinking on the fringes of the European left is, of course, nothing new. Nor is the reluctant (and sometimes not so reluctant) conclusion that the left must do business with the radical populist right, or the unhealthy fascination some figures have with Donald Trump and MAGA. Fico has included radical right parties in his coalition governments since the mid-2000s. Czech “conservative socialist” intellectuals have drawn similar conclusions. The British Labour parliamentarian Lord Maurice Glasman, intellectual guru of the Blue Labour movement, is a J.D. Vance admirer and attended Trump’s presidential inauguration.

In his speech, Fico tried to present himself to the US conservative and MAGA audience as a right-wing populist in the mould of Viktor Orbán, completely airbrushing out his left-wing and communist background. It was an unmemorable, wooden speech delivered without much panache — Fico’s English wasn’t quite good enough to reproduce his hard-hitting speaking style in Slovak. It ticked off standard socially conservative themes on gender and rehashed anti-Ukrainian, Kremlin-aligned talking points that Fico shares with Trump.

The speech also struck some odd notes. Listeners probably understood — or cared — little about Fico’s complaints of political “persecution” while in opposition. His evocation of Slovakia’s anti-fascist traditions, by mentioning Slovaks who fought in the US Army in WWII, may have been intended more for a domestic US audience than for CPAC attendees. His brief plea about tariffs toward the end of the speech struck a bathetic note, at odds with the anti-liberal bombast. It only underscored the reality that the existence and interests of small Central and Eastern European countries count for little — and probably don’t register at all — with a Trump administration inclined to sideline the EU entirely and carve up the world into spheres of influence.

As the Slovak press was quick to note, Fico did get a name-check from Trump at CPAC, along with various US state-level politicians and other foreign guests. But the speech is likely to have very limited — if any — political impact and seems oddly belated. Anyone on the US right looking for a Central European representative of MAGA-style populism will continue to favour the better-known, more established, and more ideologically heavy-hitting Orbán, whose total dominance of Hungarian politics means he has real achievements under his belt. Despite aggressively dismantling Slovakia’s public broadcaster and special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, Fico’s shaky left-nationalist coalition has done far less — and certainly won’t win any prizes from Elon Musk for “moving fast and breaking things.”

With a Trump 2.0 presidency now taking shape, the period when the US MAGA right, in opposition, was interested in foreign models and supportive European leaders is well and truly over. Compared to Orbán — or even Czech President Miloš Zeman, who backed Trump as early as 2016 — Fico has arrived too late to the party.

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Sean Hanley is a full-time professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College of London. His research focuses on the transformation of established parties and the rise of anti-establishment parties in Central and Eastern Europe.