Did Slovakia Just Switch Sides?

Robert Fico’s sudden enthusiasm for the EU shows Trump’s influence is waning.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron with Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico. (Photo by Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images.)

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If Slovakia’s current foreign policy pivot holds, it may be remembered as one of the most extraordinary volte-faces in modern European politics—not because of its impact, but simply because of the head-spinning optics. Within less than two weeks in January, Slovakia’s populist-nationalist prime minister, Robert Fico, went from being one of the EU’s most vociferous, MAGA-adjacent critics to someone who now apparently wants to work alongside France’s Emmanuel Macron on Europe’s “strategic wake-up.”

What happened? Reporting by Politico and an earlier testimony by one of Fico’s coalition partners, Andrej Danko, suggest that Fico’s own European awakening was prompted by his 45-minute conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on January 17. According to sources privy to conversations at the recent European Council, Fico described Trump as “dangerous” and was frightened by his “psychological state.”

Days later, Slovakia turned down Trump’s invitation to join his Board of Peace. On January 24, the country’s foreign ministry issued an unusual, strongly worded statement about Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. And then there was a two-hour conversation with Macron in Paris.

In isolation, none of these events look like much. Officially, Fico continues to reject Politico’s interpretation of events and calls the outlet “hateful.” There is also Slovakia’s supposed foreign policy of reconciling with EU partners alongside outreach to the likes of China, Russia—and Trump.

Yet it is obvious that something happened, likely at the Mar-a-Lago meeting—which took place at the height of the Greenland crisis—that made Slovakia’s mini-Orbán change course. Until recently, Fico seemed all in on the populist revolt fomented in Europe by MAGA. Already in 2018, Fico’s former foreign policy advisor (then the foreign minister and president of the UN General Assembly) was corresponding with Jeffrey Epstein about connecting the prime minister with Steve Bannon.

A Soviet nostalgist, Fico has also been consistent in praising Trump’s efforts to put pressure on Ukraine in order to bring the war to an end. Last year, he spoke at CPAC conferences in DC and Budapest, articulating his alignment with Trump’s international agenda, immigration restrictions, and fight against “wokeism.” In December, he even told the Slovak parliament that he did not really care whether “the EU goes belly up.”

And it was not just talk. The Mar-a-Lago meeting was likely facilitated by Fico’s deal with the U.S. company Westinghouse to build a new nuclear reactor in Slovakia. The preliminary agreement, without much in terms of competitive bidding, was concluded with the American administration just a day earlier and is worth $17.5 billion. Slovakia has also not shied away from buying U.S. military equipment, including F-16s and Black Hawks, which were procured despite their substantial price tags relative to European alternatives.

Fico’s government, in other words, had made both rhetorical and financial commitments to Trump’s United States—and the Florida meeting was meant to be a symbolically important moment, at least for Fico. Of course, Slovakia is not high on Trump’s own agenda, as Fico lacks Orbán’s gravitas and Slovakia never invested as deeply in building influence in Washington as Hungary did. It was not a surprise that Trump’s social media channels did not even mention the meeting.

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Europe Needs A New Union

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Yet, strikingly, Fico did not go out of his way to publicize it either—the one Facebook post he rolled out, featuring a couple of photographs from the reunion, looks perfunctory by the standards of a skilled political communicator like Fico.

To be sure, no one should be under any illusions about Fico’s transformation into a statesman dedicated to the European project. Fico flipped on major foreign policy issues before—after defying EU law during the refugee crisis of 2015, he developed a keen interest in bringing Slovakia into the EU’s “integration core,” and then turned into Steve Bannon’s would-be apprentice. None of these moves reflected deeper international considerations or visions of Slovakia’s place in Europe—they simply reflected immediate political needs.

Today, Fico commands little trust in Europe. Under his watch, Slovakia contributed nothing constructive to the EU’s common initiatives. Sure, Macron is happy to have one less headache to worry about at the European Council. But neither he nor any other big European player is going to go out of their way to make Fico feel welcome again.

Oddly, the more important signal that Fico’s change of heart sends is one for the United States. Fico is the ultimate political (and literal) survivor, having survived an assassination attempt in 2024. Fico has now been Slovakia’s prime minister for the better part of 20 years. Slovak public opinion has always had a sizeable anti-American streak, which limited just how close Fico could get to MAGA—although there was also a palpable effort to portray Slovakia’s governing coalition as part of the broader grouping of “patriotic” forces in Europe, which Washington should be assisting according to last year’s National Security Strategy.

Yet Fico rarely makes rash or sudden decisions. That suggests that something indeed transpired at Mar-a-Lago or in its aftermath that made Fico conclude that hitching his wagon to Trump was an intolerably risky proposition. The most straightforward explanation can be found by looking at Trump himself, who has become a singularly unpopular figure in Slovakia, including among Fico’s supporters. Among the voters of his party, SMER, Trump’s approval collapsed from 61 percent in March 2025 to 16 percent in January 2026.

And it is not just Slovakia where Trump’s (and by extension, sadly, America’s) brand is toxic. For a number of the president’s putative allies, proximity to Trump is a liability, rather than the asset that Bannon would like to leverage. That may not be good news for the United States, but it does offer a silver lining.

Let’s face it: if successful, the populating of European governments with “patriotic” voices would be catastrophic for Europe and for the transatlantic partnership. At a time when Europeans need to work together to fill the monumental gaps left by the United States in the continent’s security architecture, electoral triumphs by the likes of the Alternative for Germany or French National Rally could paralyze the bloc and embolden Russia.

Yet, as the meeting between Fico and Trump illustrates—along with Elon Musk’s earlier efforts on the AfD’s behalf—the MAGA movement does not have a whole lot of political currency to spend in Europe, short of Russian-style social media campaigns and bribery. As a result, the prospect of a “Nationalist International,” entertained by the likes of Bannon, remains firmly in the domain of fever dream—and will likely stay there for the remainder of this administration. That might not be much of a consolation—but it is better than the alternative.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.

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