In the end, there was no surprise, no shock. The result of the Czech parliamentary elections adhered more or less to the predictions advanced by pollsters. It could have been worse: that was the most common refrain on the lips of Czechs who had feared a rout at the hands of radical factions on either end of the political spectrum.
Earlier this month, as polls opened, I met a 90-year-old babushka as she inched her way to the nearest booth with the aid of two walking sticks. Having endured the horrors of the 20th century, she was determined to use her vote to block the resurgence of “evil”. Young people flocking to the extremes of Left and Right made her “sick and sad,” she explained, “because they don’t understand how much progress we have made.” When the results were declared the next evening, the Communists were effectively wiped out, failing to breach the 5% threshold to secure seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Czech Parliament. The far-Right SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy), having entered the election with 20 seats, returned with 15.
The nominal winner of the race — which produced no decisive victor — is ANO, a party bereft of coherent ideology. Its founder, Andrej Babiš, is an “anythingarian”: a highly adaptable Slovak-born billionaire who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021 and calls himself a “Czech-first” nationalist. His rivals cast Babiš as a threat to Czech security, a soft-on-Russia comrade of Viktor Orbán’s who would terminate Prague’s vital military assistance to Ukraine. His victory is being portrayed as a boost to “populism”.
The fundamental mistake of this view is its underlying supposition that Babiš’s politics are animated by conviction. In reality, Babiš fashions his beliefs in accordance with the prevailing mood. He is an insider who advertises himself as an outsider, a Croesus who has proclaimed himself the tribune of the abandoned masses. He is a consummate salesman, transactional to his marrow. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, Babiš put on a red baseball cap modelled on MAGA, inscribed with the slogan Strong Czechia. He relished being called the “Czech Trump” and bragged about his multiple meetings with Trump.
But once Trump lost to Joe Biden, Babiš swiftly discarded the MAGA imagery. Unlike, say, Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s president, or indeed Orbán himself, Babiš is not a fixture in the MAGA galaxy. During the campaign he explicitly dissented from Trump’s demand to NATO members to raise their defence spending to 5% of GDP. He also kept his distance from Orbán.
In opposition, Babiš had intuited that, for all the adulation directed at the Czech Republic for arming Kyiv and sheltering Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war, ordinary people were suffering under a programme of austerity instituted to pay down the national debt. He saw an opening and seized it. Questioning why Prague was lavishing largesse on a foreign country while inflicting privations on its own citizens earned him the contempt of Europeans. But it also appealed to a sizable segment of the Czech electorate, the only constituency that mattered to Babiš as he plotted his return to power.
He was not, however, a one note candidate. He tantalised the electorate with an array of promises — handouts to the elderly and the young; lower taxes and energy tariffs; tax cuts and higher wages — that many Czechs found hard to resist. Even his party’s acronym, which means “yes”, radiates this all-encompassing brand of pragmatism.
Yet if ANO received the largest share of the vote, it failed to win an absolute majority. What is remarkable about this election is not only the return of Babiš; it is also the collapse of the centre — that political area of compromise and alignment that makes a democracy governable. The Czech Republic is self-woundingly riven: no party, faction or alliance can claim to speak for a clear majority of the people. Years of austerity, uneven distribution of prosperity between Prague and the regions, and disillusionment with the political class, have worsened the divisions between urban and rural voters, the young and the old, the winners and the losers of the post-1989 generation.
“The Czech Republic is self-woundingly riven”
In 2021, the spectre of Babiš’s re-election, unifying liberal and conservative forces in opposition to him, gave rise to Spolu, an ideologically kaleidoscopic coalition that succeeded in keeping him out of office. After four years in government, Spolu looked bleached of purpose. Its leader, Petr Fiala, a bespectacled, button-down conservative, won plaudits in Brussels for his unwavering solidarity with Ukraine, but struggled to stabilise the unsteady economy at home, where he presided over soaring inflation, flat wages, and a housing crisis. A traditionalist who believes that marriage can only “be the union of a man and a woman”, he fell out last year with the Pirate Party — the most socially liberal member of the ruling coalition — when he sacked its leader, precipitating the Pirates’ exit.
Once the Pirates left, Spolu crawled further to the Right. And, as elections approached, Fiala was deeply unpopular: polls showed nearly four-in-five Czechs distrusted him. Unable to defend his record, his side attacked Babiš as a Russian stooge, a threat to Czech national security, and a reckless populist. It did not work.
In truth, though, the reflex of labelling figures like Babiš as “populists” reveals more about their opponents than about them. In fact, the term “populist” itself has become a convenient rhetorical comfort-blanket for sedentary critics, a means to brandish virtue while avoiding difficult questions about why so many voters are turning away from them. It obscures the actual reasons that prompt voters to turn to parties such as ANO.
The forces long dismissed as “populism” have now migrated from the margins of debate to the machinery of power. To govern, Babiš will need the support of two Right-wing parties: Motorists for Themselves (Motoristé Sobě) and the SPD. Motorists, a newcomer, is a party of reaction. It opposes Europe’s climate policies, favours continued coal use, and despises cycle lanes. It emerged from frustrations with the state and bureaucracy. At the Motorists’ smart post-election reception at Prague’s Martinický Palace, I met Jiří Vlk, a pilot and entrepreneur. He told me that when the country was ravaged by forest fires in 2022, he deployed his fleet of helicopters to rescue people, personally piloting a chopper to save about ten individuals. His reward for this act of gallantry? A fine from the government for not filing the correct forms and obtaining the proper permit before commencing his rescue mission. Founded three years ago, the Motorists won 13 seats in parliament in this election.
The SPD, the other Right-wing party, is anti-migration, anti-EU, and anti-Nato. It wants the Czech Republic to seal itself off from outsiders and devote itself to re-creating an apparently uncontaminated past. Its leader, the Japan-born Tomio Okamura, was severely bullied as a boy. And the SPD, as a Motorists leader put it to me, has become a platform for Okamura to ventilate his inner rage. It performed worse than expected. The trouble for Babiš, who is 21 seats short of a majority, is that he cannot govern without the SPD’s support; at the same time, he does not want to be tainted by association with them. Ultimately, though, what matters most to him is his own survival. Last week, he announced a prospective cabinet featuring the far-Right, which will oversee defence, agriculture and transport.
Whether Babiš will himself become prime minister is still unclear. He is a defendant in a long-running fraud case over EU farm subsidies, after Prague’s High Court annulled his acquittal by lower court earlier this year; Czech conflict of interest laws may require him to relinquish control of his vast business empire before taking office. Those who know Babiš say he will do everything in his power to both keep his business holdings and become prime minister. But Petr Pavel, a former Nato general who defeated Babiš in the presidential elections of 2023, may yet block him. The prospects of a presidential barrier are diminishing by the day. But if he is prevented from taking office, Babiš will turn to proxies and govern as a puppeteer.
Either way, once ANO assembles a government, its direction will depend upon the extent to which it must depend on two hard-Right partners. If the SPD’s demand for plebiscites on EU and Nato membership, and the Motorists’ agitation against the Green Deal, gain traction, Prague will drift further from Europe. The greater risk, from the perspective of Brussels, is a revived partnership between Babiš, Orbán, and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. Collectively, this triumvirate could form a wrecking coalition. Such a future is far from certain, of course. Czech coalition talks could drag on, and Orbán, the linchpin of this league, will face a credible challenge at next year’s elections in Hungary.
But the very possibility of such an alliance ought to trouble Europe. What is denounced as “populism” is not so much a cogent creed as a verdict on the emptiness of the centre. The greater danger for liberal Europe, in other words, is not the strength of these movements: it is the weakness of those who define themselves against them.
Almost four decades after the Velvet Revolution, one of the most dramatic and peaceful transitions from communism to democracy in Europe, Czech politics have settled into the same uneasy pattern seen across much of the continent: volatile, distrustful, and increasingly open to insurgent movements on the Left and Right. Czech democracy has matured and is institutionally robust — the judiciary is independent, and the Czech senate, controlled by Fiala’s coalition, has the powers to block the government’s attempts at overreach — but ordinary citizens measure its success less by its lofty ideals than by the responsiveness of those in power. This is a truth Babiš’s opponents should absorb in opposition.
