Czech billionaire Andrej Babis is on track to return to power after securing a decisive victory in a parliamentary election, pledging to undo four years of austerity and curb military aid to Ukraine.
Mr Babis’s populist ANO took 36 per cent of the vote, the party’s best result, data from the Czech Statistics Office showed on Saturday, with about 95 per cent of precincts counted. The coalition of his main rival, prime minister Petr Fiala, secured 23 per cent.
Campaigning on a Donald Trump-inspired message of placing Czechs first, 71-year-old former premier canvassed the eastern European nation on a platform of jump-starting economic growth, cutting corporate taxes and ending a regime of belt-tightening.
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Tapping voter frustration with the government’s response to a cost-of-living crisis, Mr Babis promised that he would end policies that were making Czechs poorer — and promote the country’s place in Europe by focusing on transactional politics over values espoused by Brussels.
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Two smaller parties that could give Mr Babis a path to a majority secured enough votes to enter parliament. That puts the billionaire in position to return to high office after leading the opposition in the Czech Republic for the last four years.
A comeback would add to a roster of populist leaders in the region — Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico — who have taken aim at European Union institutions. While Mr Babis displayed more pragmatic leadership during his previous term in power, he vowed to buck the EU trend on defense spending and immigration.
Czech president Petr Pavel has said he’ll start talks on forming a coalition on Sunday. Mr Babis has signalled that the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy and the populist Motorists party would be his preferred governing partners.
With ANO winning every Czech region outside the capital Prague, Mr Fiala’s allies struggled to muster the votes to create a path for the premier to stay in power. Mayors and Independents, a party aligned with with the incumbents, secured more than 11 per cent, while the Czech Pirate Party — a pro-European, liberal party that left Fiala’s coalition in 2024 — took 9 per cent, according to the count.
The billionaire, who amassed a fortune in agribusiness in the decades after the fall of communism, shook up the Czech political system in 2017 and vowing to root out corruption. In his four years in power, he took aim at the Brussels establishment, oversaw a chaotic pandemic response and became entangled in corruption scandals.
During the campaign, Mr Babis said he wants to boost infrastructure and other investments to grow the economy as much as 4 per cent a year and pledged to bring CEZ AS, the country’s biggest power producer, fully into state hands.
In contrast with Orban and Fico, Babis has never aligned himself with Russian president Vladimir Putin. But he’s made common cause with populist counterparts on halting migration into Europe. - Bloomberg
