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University of Birmingham
Italian version supporting a closer relationship with Russia and calling for no more tanks for Ukraine. icholas Muller/S/Alamy
As Russia keeps pounding Ukrainian cities with airstrikes and advances along the frontline in Donbas, regional elections in two states in eastern Germany have seen a surge of support for parties on the extreme right and extreme left.
What is particularly concerning is that,
They put most of the blame on the west for provoking Russia and tap into a reservoir of fear 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 states in central and eastern Europe that were under Soviet control until 1989 have seen the rise of similar sentiments, most notably among them EU and NATO members Slovakia and Hungary.
The same is true for some states that were formerly part 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,
In Hungary, this pro-Russian position is predominantly associated with the country's 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.
Despite securing less than half of the vote in European elections for the first time in two decades, Orbán doubled down on his pro-Putin stance.
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, Fico is a left-wing populist and has moderated his stance on Ukraine following a visit to Kyiv in January 2024.
Outside NATO and the EU, other leaders have also cosied up to Putin.
Since the start of the war against Ukraine in February 2022, Azerbaijan has been pivotal to Russia, providing access to essential trade corridors, to circumvent western sanctions.
One of these is the international north-south transport corridor which links Russia through Azerbaijan to Iran.
Azerbaijan also submitted its official application to join the Brics alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) a day after Putin's visit in August.
It also applied, at the end of July, for observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), bringing Azerbaijan one step closer to full membership in the Chinese-led bloc.
And then there is Georgia - once a beacon of democratic renewal in the post-Soviet space and now gradually sliding into pro-Russian autocracy.
Rhetorically, the Georgian government remains committed to EU membership.
Yet relations with the EU have soured significantly since the spring when the government in Tbilisi rammed through the so-called foreign agents law, despite public and EU protests.
The law presents a potentially useful tool for Georgia's government to constrain the work of pro-European civil society organizations, and is modeled on recently expanded Russian legislation.
Authoritarian drift
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,
...did not start with the war in Ukraine, but has undoubtedly accelerated as a result.
The political leaders driving it capitalize on, and carefully channel, different public sentiments.
One of these is,
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 Organization (CSTO) - a mini post-Soviet Warsaw pact successor - indicates that geopolitical alignments are not set in stone.
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,
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