• I’m not even going to read the article; Ukraine is no where near being able to join NATO anyways.

    Hungary and Turkey have shown that just signing off on NATO membership for the sake of your own people and country’s safety is a dumb idea; why do that when you can block it and get concessions of some kind out of it. Reward bad behavior and all that.

    If Ukraine ‘wins’ the war, has peace, and meets requirements for joining NATO, we can look at the idea then, but until then, there is just no way Ukraine is going to join NATO anyways. Even if we expedited all the pre-work for that time, and the time came, several countries are going to block it.

  • This is the price the EU has to pay for having wanted to expand to the East without verifying that the annexed countries were meeting requirements or were mature enough democracies. And the price to pay is immobilism today (in a situation that would rather require action) and doom tomorrow.

    But, since we are on Lemmy where the average user goes like “Europeans are ex-colonialist capitalist exploiters and need to be eaten alive”, in the end I think the situation is going towards the better for humanity.

    • I mean, EU expansion was arguably too quick, but as a western European I’m really not going to lecture eastern europe on democracy.

      Off the top of my head: Wilders and Baudet; De Winter; AfD; Le Pen’s party loans being bought up by a Russian company with ties to the defense industry; Salvini, Meloni, Berlusconi, the Mafia and bungabunga; Farage, Johnson, Cambridge analytica, Russian press barons and Londongrad; the Denmark Democrats, the Sweden Democrats; Spain’s Francoist history, seperatism, apologists, and Vox; an Austrian foreign minister dancing with Putin at her wedding; the former German chancellor Schroeder’s ties to Russian energy companies, respected experts who turn out to be on Putin’s payroll, Ostalgie and AfD, Merkel and Dieselgate; Cyprus, Russians buying passports, Russian owned bank accounts; Malta and murdered journalists; etc. etc. etc.

    • Slovakia literary met the standards of democracy, what the fuck are you talking about? Its all thanks to democracy that populist mafioso bastard Fico won in the first place. Stupid old dumbfucks voted for him.

      Do you think the young population voted for him? Some are stupid or controlled by their parents, sure, so they did. But the majority of people with working brains voted for PS (Progressive Slovakia) who would have brought hope to this country.

      You call small eastern european countries “not mature enough” yet super mature democracies still vote fascists into government. I wonder why that is.

        • 681,017 vs 533,136; 22.94% vs 17.9% Turnout was 68.51%.

          The second best party for this country got 187,645 votes which is 6.32%

          They lost by much less than last time, which is a good but the fact so many people voted for a mafioso who killed a journalist (and his pregnant wife) who was looking into the crimes of him and his acomplices is crazy. His voters swallowed the anti-gay, anti-EU pill whole, and it shows, as they are impossible to talk to.

          Can they win the next election? I don’t know. As far as I know, a massive amount of people are too far gone to change. They are too deep into propaganda to see that the people they idolize hurt them more than the people they hate irrationally. All they care about is the fact that the people they hate are getting hurt, I guess. Or they are jusy deeply stupid.

          Many young people left when SMER won, many moved out, many are planning to. But with recent anti democratic actions (trying to gain as much power as possible), many of these people started protesting again, just like we did when Fico got deposed.

          I don’t know. All i do is protest, use my voice, use my wallet and make sure they know that we wont let them take over our country. We wont let Fico do what Orban did to Hungary.

          Edit: forgot to source the election data. Wikipedia is great for elections.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Slovak_parliamentary_election