Today and tomorrow, voters in the Czech Republic will decide all 200 seats in their Chamber of Deputies and their next Prime Minister! The leading candidate in the race is a right-wing populist billionaire who previously led the government from 2017 to 2021 and is now looking to make a political comeback amidst a criminal fraud case. Sound familiar?
That man is Andrej Babiš, who leads the ANO party (ANO stands for “Action of Dissatisfied Citizens” and is also the Czech word for “Yes”) and was previously Czechia’s prime minister from 2017 to 2021. He also owns the conglomerate Agrofert, which has now expanded to include over 250 subsidiaries in the agriculture, food, chemical, and logistics sectors, among others.
In the 2021 parliamentary elections, Babiš’s ANO-led government was defeated in an upset victory by a conservative-liberal alliance led by current Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala. That alliance consisted of two coalitions, the center-right SPOLU (Czech for “Together”) and the liberal Pirates and Mayors. SPOLU is itself made up of three parties, the Civic Democratic Party, KDU-ČSL, and TOP 09. Similarly, the Pirates and Mayors coalition consists of the Czech Pirate Party and the Mayors and Independents Party (so yes, 5 total parties are part of the alliance that defeated ANO). That victory was the closest parliamentary election in Czech history and considered unexpected because no poll had SPOLU leading ANO in the lead-up to the election.
Now Babiš and ANO are leading in the polls again, but very few traders believe an upset is likely this time.
During the campaign, Babiš has been hammering the ruling coalition for the Czech Republic’s recent economic woes, including an energy crisis and high inflation. He has also pledged to restrict immigration, oppose the EU’s green policies and roll back Fiala’s pension reform, which in part raised the retirement age to 67.
Another key issue has been the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Czech Republic’s stance towards Russia. Critics fear that if Babiš were to follow Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia, who have both refused to provide military aid to Ukraine and continue to maintain close economic ties to Russia, including importing Russian oil. Indeed, Prime Minister Petr Fiala and SPOLU have sought to emphasize the implications of an ANO win for relations with Russia and made their tough stance towards Moscow a centerpiece of their campaign.
For his part, Babiš has repeatedly expressed that he is not pro-Russia and does not want to leave the EU or NATO. But Babiš and ANO will likely not be the only parties in power. That’s because polls – and our traders – believe that ANO will come in first with over 30% of the vote, but that likely won’t be enough to win an outright majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
That means that Babiš will need to form a coalition with other parties to govern. These partners would likely include the far-left Stačilo! (“Enough!”) alliance led by the Communists, or the far-right ultranationalist Freedom and Direct Democracy party (SPD), which wants to expel nearly all the Ukrainian refugees in the country. There is also the right-wing Motorists party (AUTO), which wants to abolish all bicycle lanes and is openly opposed to the EU.
The common thread among all these parties is that they are vocally pro-Russia and are proponents of pulling the Czech Republic out of the EU and NATO. While they are unlikely to accomplish these goals with ANO as the largest party in a coalition government, it is possible that they could use their influence to exact smaller victories; these could include rejecting the EU Green Deal and its migration pact.
However, the government coalition process shakes out, the Czech government looks likely to undergo a massive change in direction after the elections. Even Czech President Petr Pavel, who defeated Babiš in the 2023 presidential election, had to admit that “we will have, most probably, a very different setup of the government.”
Image via Peggy Marco
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