Is the Soviet bloc about to be reconstituted in eastern Germany and elsewhere?
Is the Soviet bloc about to be reconstituted in eastern Germany and elsewhere?
The pro-Kremlin ideological alignment on the far right and far left should not be underestimated in its impact on the European security order.
Russia keeps pounding Ukrainian cities with airstrikes and advances along the frontline in Donbas. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky reshuffled much of his leadership team—in order to give the country new energy and strengthen the state. With uncertainty over the long-term strategic value of the incursion into the Kursk region, anxiety over the outcome of the presidential elections in the US in November, this may not quite be the last throw of the dice, but it is clear that Ukraine is, or at least is approaching, another critical juncture in its 30-month war with Russia.
The sense of shifting ground was further compounded by regional elections in two states in eastern Germany that have seen a surge of support for parties on the extreme right and extreme left, who have captured close to half of the total votes cast. Apart from their general anti-establishment and anti-immigration stance, what unites them politically is opposition to support for Ukraine and a more Putin-friendly and Kremlin-aligned view of the Russian aggression against Ukraine which puts most of the blame on the west for provoking Russia and is fearful of being dragged into a full-blown military confrontation with Moscow.
Such views, and their success at the ballot box, are not unique to the former East Germany. Other erstwhile Soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe have seen the rise of similar sentiments, most notably among them EU and Nato members Slovakia and Hungary. The same is true for some of the successor states of the Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijan and Georgia.
Representing a curious mix of fear, resentment and nostalgia, this does not mean the restoration of the Soviet bloc by stealth, but it points to an ideological consolidation of at least part of that former geographical space.
In Hungary, this is predominantly associated with the country’s far-right populist prime minister Viktor Orbán. In power since 2010, Orbán has moved himself, and his country, away from the liberal democratic ideals that he espoused in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This has led to the European commission and parliament condemning Orbán for undermining democracy and the rule of law and the European Court of Justice imposing a €200 million fine on Hungary for deliberately infringing EU asylum rules. None of that stopped Orbán from a fourth consecutive victory in national elections in 2022, but it pushed his alliance to below 50% of the vote in European parliament elections in 2024.
Despite securing fewer than half of the vote in European elections for the first time in two decades, Orbán doubled down on his pro-Putin stance. After he had been the first prime minister of any EU and Nato member to shake hands with Putin in October 2023 in Beijing at an international forum on to mark the tenth anniversary of China's Belt and Road Initiative, he repeated the same stunt in Moscow just days after Hungary assumed the EU’s rotating presidency in July 2024.
His Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, regained his country’s premiership in October 2023, also on a more pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian platform. In contrast to Orbán, however, Fico is a left-wing populist and has moderated his stance on Ukraine following a visit to Kyiv in January 2024. Yet the broader pro-Russian sentiment among a majority of the electorate was evident in the presidential elections in April 2024 won by Fico’s coalition partner Peter Pellegrini.
Outside Nato and the EU, other leaders have also cosied up to Putin. One example is Azerbaijan’s long-serving ruler Ilham Aliyev who visited Moscow in April 2024 and welcomed Putin to Baku in August. Since the start of the war against Ukraine in February 2022, Azerbaijan has been pivotal to the viability of trade corridors that are critically important to Russia in light of western sanctions, especially the International North South Transport Corridor—linking Russia through Azerbaijan to Iran—and the so-called Middle Corridor—connecting China to its European markets through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and the Black Sea.
Azerbaijan also submitted its official application to join the Brics a day after Putin’s visit in August. This followed a bid at the end of July for observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, bringing Azerbaijan one step closer to full membership in the Chinese-led bloc. Aliyev is thus locking himself more tightly into a dual Russian-Chinese embrace.
And then there is Georgia—once a beacon of democratic renewal in the post-Soviet space and now gradually sliding into pro-Russian autocracy. Despite the 2008 Russian-Georgian war that ended with Georgia’s territorial dismemberment, Tbilisi and Moscow have gradually rekindled ties under the Georgian Dream political party which has ruled the country for more than a decade now.
Rhetorically, the Georgian government remains committed to pursuing a path to EU membership, affirmed by a European Council decision of December 2023 to grant Georgia candidate country status. Yet, relations with the EU have soured significantly since the spring when the government in Tbilisi rammed the so-called foreign agents law through parliament—despite public and EU protests. Modelled on recently expanded Russian legislation, the law, a version of which has also been passed in Hungary, presents a potentially useful tool for the government to constrain the work of pro-European civil society organisations and cement the country’s path back into the Russian orbit.
The fact that more than two-and-a-half years into a brutal war, Russia as the aggressor country enjoys a kind of resurgence in sympathy must clearly be worrying for Ukraine and its western partners. The increasing authoritarian drift in eastern Germany, Slovakia and Hungary, and Azerbaijan and Georgia did not start with the war in Ukraine but has undoubtedly accelerated as a result, in part because Russia has carefully sown and fomented divisions as one component of a complex psy-ops operation directed at Europe as much as the US. The political leaders driving it are doing so by choice rather than necessity and they capitalise on, and carefully channel, different public sentiments. One of these is a long-standing fear of being dragged into a war with Russia, another is the resentment of a self-serving political establishment that has mismanaged the fallout from COVID and the cost-of-living crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. There is also, at least for some, a degree of nostalgia for an imagined Soviet bloc past and the ‘order’ that strong and essentially socially conservative leaders at the time imposed—compared with the liberal ‘chaos’ that has ensued since.
Last year’s presidential elections in the Czech Republic and parliamentary elections in Poland demonstrate that the kind of democratic backsliding seen elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc can be halted and reversed. Similarly, Armenia’s decision to pull out of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation—a mini post-Soviet Warsaw pact successor—indicates that geopolitical alignments are not set in stone.
Rather than tectonic shifts all these changes are signs of an unsettled European and global security order. When and how the war in Ukraine ends will determine what kind of new order is likely to settle in. The simultaneous rise in right- and left-wing populism and of older and newer autocracies and their ideological alignment with the Kremlin, however, sends a note of extreme caution that the reconstitution of a new liberal order is far from certain—regardless of who, if anyone, wins in Ukraine.
This is an updated and expanded version of an earlier article for The Conversation.
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