As Russia continues to launch airstrikes on Ukrainian cities and advance on the front lines line in Donbass, regional elections in two East German states showed a surge in support for far-right and far-left parties.
Of particular concern is the fact that both parties oppose support for Ukraine and take an increasingly pro-Kremlin view of Russian aggression against Ukraine. They place much of the blame on the West for provoking Russia and are inspired by the fear of being drawn into a full-scale military confrontation with Moscow. This is written by Stephen Wolf from the University of Birmingham in an article for the electronic publication The Conversation.
Such views and their electoral success are not unique to former East Germany. Other countries in Central and Eastern Europe that were under Soviet control until 1989 also witnessed similar sentiments, notably EU and NATO members such as Slovakia and Hungary.
The same applies to some countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijan and Georgia. A curious mixture of fear, resentment and nostalgia, it does not mark a secret restoration of the Soviet bloc, but it does indicate an ideological consolidation in at least part of the region.
In Hungary, this pro-Russian position is largely associated with the country's populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In power since 2010, Orbán has also moved his country away from the liberal democratic ideals he championed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This prompted the European Commission and Parliament to condemn Orbán for undermining democracy and the rule of law.
The European Court of Justice has fined Hungary €200m (£168m) for willfully breaching EU asylum rules. None of this prevented Orbán from winning a fourth consecutive national election in 2022, but it pushed his alliance to less than 50% of the vote in the 2024 European Parliament elections.
Despite receiving less than half the vote in European elections for the first time in two decades, Orbán doubled down on his support for Putin. He was the first prime minister of an EU and NATO member state to shake hands with Putin. After October 2023 in Beijing, he repeated the same trick in Moscow just days after Hungary took over the rotating presidency of the EU in July 2024.
His Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, regained the post of prime minister of the country in October 2023, also on a pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian platform. Unlike Orbán, Fico is a left-wing populist and softened his stance on Ukraine after a visit to Kiev in January 2024. However, broader pro-Russian sentiment among much of the electorate was evident in the April 2024 presidential election.
Outside NATO and the EU, other leaders have also approached Putin. One example is Azerbaijan's long-time president Ilham Aliyev, who visited Moscow in April 2024 and greeted Putin in Baku in August. Since the start of the war against Ukraine in February 2022, Azerbaijan has played a key role for Russia, providing access to important trade corridors to circumvent Western sanctions. One of them is the international North-South transport corridor that connects Russia through Azerbaijan with Iran. Azerbaijan also submitted a formal application to join the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) alliance a day after Putin's visit in August. It also applied for observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in late July, bringing Azerbaijan one step closer to full membership in the China-led bloc.
Georgia, once a beacon of democratic revival in the post-Soviet space, is now gradually sliding towards pro-Russian autocracy.
Tbilisi and Moscow have gradually rekindled ties under the leadership of the Georgian Dream political party, which ruled the country for more than a decade despite the 2008 Russo-Georgian war.
Rhetorically, the Georgian government remains committed to EU membership. By decision of the European Council from December 2023, Georgia received the status of a candidate country. However, relations with the EU have deteriorated significantly since the spring, when the government in Tbilisi pushed through the so-called foreign agents law despite public and EU protests.
The law is a potentially useful tool for the Georgian government to restrict the work of pro-European civil society organizations and is modeled after recently expanded Russian legislation.
Authoritarian drift
The fact that more than two and a half years after the start of the brutal war, Russia as the aggressor country is enjoying a kind of resurgence of sympathy should obviously cause concern for Ukraine and its Western partners. The growing authoritarian drift in East Germany, Slovakia and Hungary, as well as in Azerbaijan and Georgia, did not start with the war in Ukraine, but has undoubtedly accelerated as a result.
The political leaders who run it take advantage of different public sentiments and channel them carefully. One is the continued fear of being drawn into a war with Russia, the other is resentment of the self-serving political overreach that has failed to deal with the effects of COVID and the cost-of-living crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.
Also, for some at least, there is a degree of nostalgia for the imagined past of the Soviet bloc and the "order" that the strong and essentially socially conservative leaders of the time imposed, compared to the liberal "chaos" that ensued since then .
Presidential elections in the Czech Republic and parliamentary elections in Poland last year showed that the democratic retreat seen in other former Soviet bloc countries can be halted and reversed. Likewise, Armenia's decision to leave the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, a mini-successor to the post-Soviet Warsaw Pact, shows that geopolitical alliances are not set in stone.
All these changes are signs of an unsettled European and world security order.
When and how the war in Ukraine ends will determine what new order is likely to emerge. However, the simultaneous rise of right-wing and left-wing populism, as well as old and new autocracies and their ideological unity with the Kremlin, sends a note of extreme caution that the restoration of a new liberal order is far from guaranteed, regardless of who wins in Ukraine and whether someone will win at all.