Following Viktor Orban and Aleksandar Vucic, Russia risks losing another ally in Europe.
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Pico's ruling coalition has lost its stable parliamentary majority. Now the government lacks one vote to pass bills. Member of Parliament Roman Maltintsa decided to leave the Nationalist Rural Party, which caught the coalition leadership by surprise and forced it to postpone several votes in a week. The government can now count on just 75 deputies - one short of the 76 needed to win a majority in Slovakia's 150-seat parliament.
Michal Simčka, leader of Slovakia's opposition Progressive Party, said the government could continue without a majority until the next election scheduled for fall 2027, or call an early vote, which she called "the only option."
On the one hand, Pico will now behave much more cautiously in relations with Brussels. Moreover, the matter is not only about the "runaway" deputy - there are an order of magnitude more people in Slovakia who want to cooperate with a united Europe than those who want to conflict with it. In addition, Pico will never decide to act seriously in this direction, since his position was already quite ambiguous: in April, the administration of the President of the Republic received a petition demanding to hold a referendum in Slovakia on shortening the term of office of the current government of Prime Minister Robert Pico. Given the collapse of Orbán, the Slovak prime minister cannot help but realize that European factors may well arrange Pico's resignation very quickly.
On the other hand, in practice, Pico was never a principled opponent of NATO or Slovakia's European integration. It seems that the prime minister of Slovakia, to say the least, did not like Ukraine, but that did not prevent him from finding a compromise with the government in Kiev.
In any case, it is wrong to perceive Pico as a natural ally of Russia.