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Slovakia is on the verge of appointing a new populist, nationalist government.

Robert Fico, the former Prime Minister, and his left-wing nationalist Smer party clearly won the elections earlier this month. Fico has just launched negotiations to form a coalition with the most pro-Russian political force in Slovakia – the SNS (Slovak National Party) – and the social democratic Hlas party.

If he is successful, Slovakia’s foreign policy orientation will change, most visibly regarding the war in Ukraine.

How did this happen, and why did the nationalist SNS do so well in the elections?

This is a very different SNS from the one Slovakia used to know. Of the ten people on its list who entered parliament, only its chairman Andrej Danko, is a member of the party. The rest are various conspirators and stars of the disinformation scene, given a place at the top by Danko.

Some of them used to be on the list of the Slovak fascist party, People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS). Another pair of new MPs come from the pro-Russian internet television channel, TV Slovan.

Affection for Russia is not their only strong theme. They want to unblock all disinformation websites and repeal the decrees on transgender people. Also, a doctor who spoke out against Covid vaccination and would like to deal with chemtrails (a conspiracy theory about trails left by aircraft) is also on board.

Thanks to them, Danko entered parliament, but it is questionable whether he can keep the non-party members under control, and not pay for the fact that he has turned a Nationalist party into a vehicle for conspiracy theories.

The only person who could have been able to stop this coalition is Peter Pellegrini, chairman of Hlas, who sees himself as pro-European and who came third in the elections. Pellegrini left Smer and founded his own party after the murder of Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak in 2018.

As kingmaker, Pellegrini could also have tried to form a government with the liberals led by Progressive Slovakia and the Christian Democrats. But in the end, he chose the populist and nationalist option.

Estonia’s radical party Eesti Konservatiivne Rahvaerakond (EKRE – the Estonian Conservative People’s Party) is the most popular party in the country, but finds it hard to attract talented politicians.

When EKRE was part of the government from 2019 to 2021, its member Marti Kuusik was the first of four ministers for foreign trade and IT. He lasted just one day before allegations against him of domestic abuse surfaced.

The second EKRE foreign trade minister, Kert Kingo, disliked travelling abroad and speaking English. She was later charged with abusing her expenses.

EKRE brought in the third minister, Kaimar Karu, from outside its membership pool, and he was considered competent, but refused to join the toxic party, so the Conservatives replaced him with a loyalist who lasted nine months until the government fell.

“If a district administrator or a mayor is elected who belongs to the AfD, it is natural to look for ways in which we can continue to work together in such a city.”

– Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative party CDU

Germany’s Conservative CDU party’s deputies should cooperate with potential mayors from the far-right party AfD in local parliaments, according to CDU leader Friedrich Merz, in a statement that shocked the republic last July.

With this admission, he weakened his party’s 2018 resolution not to cooperate with AfD at any federal level, including in local parliaments. Following harsh criticism even from within his own party, Merz had to retract his announcement a few hours after it was made.

However, in mid-September, the CDU, together with the Liberal Democrats and the AfD, passed a law to reduce land taxes in the federal state of Thuringia against the left-green minority government. There was no significant outcry from within the CDU.

The AfD is also making huge gains. In the elections in Hessia and Bavaria last Sunday, the party became stronger than ever before in these states. AfD is now the second-largest party in Hessia.

In the eastern states, they are even heading for victory. Elections will be held in Thuringia, Saxonia and Brandenburg in 2024. The AfD is leading the polls in all three.

He is young, unafraid of controversy and taking new voters by storm. Slawomir Mentzen, 37, is the rising star of Poland’s far-right party Konfederacja. This new party is expected to win around 10 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections on Sunday.

Konfederacja will owe this to Mentzen, who has boosted the party’s poll numbers. He is particularly popular among men in the 18-39 age group. During the campaign, hundreds of young men queued up outside meetings with him across Poland called ‘Beer with Mentzen’.

At these events, he takes the stage and, with a mug of beer in one hand and a microphone in the other, he talks about his views on taxes, immigrants, and the welfare system. He would gladly abolish them all.

These ideas appeal to Poland’s young, who do not use the health service as much as the elderly, and regard the taxes they pay as a necessary evil. They expect simple answers to complex questions.

Mentzen owns a law firm that deals with “so-called” tax optimisation, and a brewery. During his beer meetings (where Mentzen gets increasingly drunk, which also pleases the public), the politician is supposed to show the softer face of the far-right party. Konfederacja’s other radical politicians have been sidelined for the duration of the campaign.

Meanwhile, Mentzen himself shares the same extremist views. In 2019, he said: “We don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and the European Union”. Now he is adding Ukrainians, who he says are draining the Polish tax system and receiving overly generous benefits from the state.

The Confederation’s anti-Ukrainian campaign is also the reason why the ruling Law and Justice party has turned against Ukraine in recent weeks. With an Ukraine-sceptic approach, the governing party hopes to siphon voters from this far-right group.

On 3 January 2021, the French military bombed a group of men gathered near the village of Bounti, in central Mali. All were “terrorists”, according to officials from France, which had a military presence in the Sahelian country from 2013 to 2022.

A UN inquiry published three weeks after the attack rejected this hypothesis. Of the 22 people killed, 19 were civilians attending a wedding. The other three were armed men belonging to the Katiba Serma, a mysterious jihadist group. France has always contested the UN report, claiming to have shot down “jihadist fighters” identified after conducting a long “intelligence operation”.

The Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy was mainly non-violent, but many unresolved issues are returning to the public debate, especially concerning what justice means.

In 1975, the dictator Franco dies. Spain starts its transition to democracy. Why was it necessary to enforce a transition without seeking formal justice for the past? 

The Spanish transition was highly conditioned by those who carried out the process: the heirs of the dictatorship. There were some concessions [to democracy and transitional justice], but they were not too extensive, and the idea was to keep the former power brokers protected. For example, the amnesty law: it was planned to investigate the victims during the dictatorship, but the perpetrators also used it to cover themselves. This sets the tone for the Spanish transition.

Abroad, people often talk about Spain as a model of peaceful transition. I’m quite critical of that idyllic vision, but [the political protagonists of the transition] did what could be done at the time. It wasn’t about a “scorched earth” policy, and it is important to know the balance of power at that moment. Perhaps criticising the transition from the current perspective is a bit too much. But I also think that over 40 years more could have been done.

What exactly could have been done?

There are some issues pending: for example, a Truth Commission. Transitional justice has three dimensions: truth, justice, and reparation. We think a lot on the justice dimension, on punishing the guilty, but the dimension of truth in Spain has not been properly developed at the time. I believe there has never been a serious debate about it.

How do you see the Spanish transition treated as a “model” for other conflicts?

It shouldn’t be a model in a sense that this is something worthy of imitating. When talking about the Spanish transition as exemplary, it seems to me that it is part of a flawed speech on the equality between the sides like: “atrocities were committed by both sides” or “the best thing is to forget everything”.

Accountability for crimes under the communist state dictatorship and repression after the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution is still a sensitive issue in Hungary. At the time of the regime change in 1989, the situation was clear: the key to a peaceful transition was to spare the guilty.

In 1990, Gábor Péter, the dreaded commander of the pre-1956 communist political police, the ÁVH, was still alive. So was former Interior Minister Béla Biszku, one of the main perpetrators of the post-revolutionary repressions. Ferenc Vida, the judge who sentenced to death Imre Nagy, the Prime Minister of the revolutionary government, was also still living. They bore no legal responsibility for their deeds at that time.

Decades later, Béla Biszku was tried under international law. Trials, which started in 2010, ended without a final conviction. In March 2016, 95-year-old Biszku died in liberty. If he had continued living, who knows whether he would receive a real sentence.

The reason for this doubt is that the European Court of Human Rights in 2008 acquitted one of the few men convicted in Hungary for shooting into the crowd in 1956, Captain János Korbely. According to the court’s verdict, Korbely’s actions were not a crime against humanity, but manslaughter. This fell under the statute of limitations, so he could not face a conviction.

Demand for accountability of former leaders definitely exists in Hungary. This is evidenced by the trials of suspects of crimes against humanity, the Salgótarján, the Mosonmagyaróvár, the Tata, and the Nyugati Pályaudvar salvo, which have received a lot of public attention. But after decades of ineffectiveness (only the Salgótarján and the Tata trials ended with convictions), people have become disillusioned, are tired of the issue and would rather not dwell on the past. After 34 years since the regime change, there is also hardly anyone still alive to convict for their crimes committed under the communist dictatorship.

“With this, Estonia will forever legalise Russia’s continued occupation. There is no reason to just give away 5.2 per cent of Estonia’s land, water and airspace.”

So said Mart Helme, one of the leaders of Estonia’s far-right EKRE party, who was also the country’s ambassador to Moscow in the 1990s. EKRE is on a mission to reclaim the areas in eastern Estonia that became part of the newborn country after a 1920 treaty with Russia.

Following the 1944 to 1991 Soviet occupation, Estonians were left with 94.8 per cent of their country, while the areas Jaanilinn and Petseri became part of The Russian Federation. It is ironic that as ambassador, Helme was part of the negotiating team that agreed to formally give up 5.2 per cent of Estonia.

EKRE voters will forgive hypocrisy, but not weakness. The scar of the lost lands will probably haunt Estonian politics beyond the still-unratified new treaty. There will always be political space for talk of an unresolved occupation.

Born in the 1980s in the Balkans, all my life has been influenced by the psychosis of war and ethnic conflict and my effort to cope with this situation, persevere and remain a ‘normal’ person who does not hate.

It started when I was roughly ten. I watched the West struggling to prevent bloodshed between small bickering Balkan nations.

First the war in Slovenia, then Croatia and the Bosnian bloodbath. Kosovo’s turn came next, a border away from my own country. Sure enough, war came to Macedonia in 2001.

Massacres, rapes, inhumanity and torture ― too many to remember, too much to handle.

As local leaders signed peace accords, grudgingly shaking hands with enemies as if small children, forced by their parents to make amends, it became clear. This was not the end. Peace didn’t return. It was just an absence of war.

Reconciliation, we were told, was the key.

Bring people together, speak openly about what happened and you will rekindle human empathy. Individualise the guilt and make those who committed crimes pay, and hope will return.

But as countries handed over their own war criminals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the opposite happened. Former warlords became folk heroes. They became “ICTY Celebrities”, viewed as martyrs by the masses.

By then, war had made losers out of us all. Even if our side had won, we lost loved ones, became refugees, were robbed of our future and scarred with fear and distrust.

The ideological successors of those warlords, who became leaders, convinced us that the people were sole victims, and that an indictment against our “beloved protector” or “freedom fighter” was a conspiracy against us all.

No uplifting note at the end. Just this thought.

War as a physical manifestation may only last a few years. But war as a personal or collective psychosis can last for generations. We have locked the hell of war in our heads, and are waiting for round two.

Last summer, my friends from NGOs and governmental organisations in Ukraine started speaking about a surprising problem in wartime. There were plenty of vacancies for jobs, with barely anyone to fill them. Different humanitarian foundations had established their offices in Ukraine, and Western partners had upscaled their operations, providing stable and well-paid jobs for locals ― but finding people for them was a struggle.

The problem was that most of these positions required good English, a university degree and thorough experience. Ukrainians who have these attributes are usually upper middle class, and are used to moving around from country to country. As the full-scale war broke out, many of them left Ukraine. This has been a strange impact of wartime migration.

Now this staffing crisis is felt throughout the economy. A coal mine in Pokrovsk, a city 40 kilometres from the frontline, pays its workers double ― and still cannot attract enough candidates. Some men have left the city, some have joined the army, and others are wounded due to hostilities. Who knew that Ukraine would feel a shortage of workers, as Russian missiles bombard our cities?

There are many other dimensions to Ukraine being on the supply side of the migration flow. Many of my friends are abroad and who knows if they will ever come back. To sustain itself in the future, Ukraine will need more people, maybe even millions. They have to come from somewhere.

It’s doubtful these will be Germans or Spaniards. The next wave of Ukraine-related migration will most possibly come from Central or South-East Asian countries. Economists and demographers are already starting to talk about this likelihood.