Andrej Babiš defeated: is this the end of Czech populism?

The second round of this weekend’s Czech presidential election was a battle between “democracy, respect for the constitution and a pro-Western orientation against populism, lies and leaning towards Russia,” said Prime Minister Petr Fiala.

With former army chief Petr Pavel a strong winner, populist former prime minister Andrej Babiš has suffered his second defeat against an established ‘elite’ in as many years.

In parliamentary elections in the autumn of 2021, he lost the premiership to Fiala, a former university rector – the archetypal establishment job – and head of the Civic Democrats (ODS), a mainstream party.

In Pavel, the Czechs get a serious and introspective military hero who says he intends to restore dignity to the presidency after ten years of outspoken and meddlesome Miloš Zeman, another populist now likely to leave the political scene.

“Populism is the problem of our time,” Pavel declared on Twitter last June, months before announcing his candidacy.

But analysts are not so sure that time is over in the Czech Republic. Although Pavel passed the ballot box, it is only one battle won, said Filip Kostelka, a professor at the European University Institute.

But the “struggle between the liberal-democratic and populist camps will continue,” he told Euronews.

The Babiš wave of populism

Babiš was hardly alone the populist wavefront that swept through the Czech Republic in the 2010s, spurred by public anger at the European Union following the 2014 migrant crisis and the economic fallout from the global financial crisis.

In 2013, when his newly minted ANO party came second in general elections and Babiš was appointed first deputy prime minister, the economy grew at 0%. The previous year, it shrank by 0.8%, according to World Bank data.

Babiš vowed to fight corruption (ironic for a man who had been haunted by corruption allegations all his life) and to rule differently from the typical Prague “elites”.

“Run the state like a business,” he declared at the start of his political career. His party ANO, which means “yes” in Czech, is an acronym meaning “Action of Dissatisfied Citizens”.

He had built his Agrofert conglomerate into one of the largest Czech companies by then, and his political career was no doubt supported after he bought major newspapers and media outlets.

Balázs Jarábik, an expert, once described Babiš as a “typical opportunist”. In the 2013 general election, he courted right-wing voters. Still, in the 2017 vote, he confirmed winning left-wing supporters away from the Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM).

Both parties subsequently fell in the polls (they failed to win seats in parliament in 2021), although they formally and informally supported his minority government after 2017 respectively.

Did Babis go broke?

Is Babiš now a spent force? Some optimists argue that his possible two-stroke knockout in the past two years suggests populism has diminishing returns, particularly among Czechs who fear their liberal traditions dating back to the 1920s are under attack.

Czechoslovakia was the last remaining democracy in the east before the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1939.

“Sooner or later, populism becomes impossible,” Pavel tweeted in December, shortly after announcing his presidential candidacy.

Some intellectuals probably agree with the potential next Czech president. Niall Ferguson, a historian, argued this month that populism has an inherent “short half-life.”

“Six years ago, populism was on the rise. It has since hit a rock,” he wrote in his Bloomberg column.

This appears to be the case in many parts of the world. Former President Donald Trump is a waning political force; Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, was way ahead of Trump in a survey last month by YouGov and the Economist.

Another YouGov poll found that support for Brexit is now at a record low. Only 32% of Britons surveyed in November said leaving the European Union was a smart move. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s version of Trump, was voted out of the presidency late last year, while populist leaders have fallen elsewhere.

Central Europe, however, is an exception.

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are still in great health; Orban’s ruling Fidesz party even increased its seat share in parliament in general elections last year. Slovakia could soon see the return of its former populist prime minister Robert Fico as the current government collapses.

But Babiš “has always been politically much weaker” than Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, the PiS head, Lubomír Kopeček, a political science professor at Masaryk University, told Euronews.

Unlike Slovakia and Hungary, which have unicameral parliaments, the Czech Republic has a robust Senate, the upper house, which keeps the Chamber of Deputies in line.

As prime minister between 2017 and 2021, Babiš led a minority government, and his party had no control over the Senate or the Constitutional Court.

But, Kostelka said, a lot comes down to luck: “The outcome of the last parliamentary election could easily have been different.”

If the Social Democratic Party had won just 0.4 percentage points more of the vote in 2021, they would have entered parliament and might have been able to reconstruct their pre-election minority coalition with Babiš’s ANO.

Had a few tens of thousands of votes gone differently, Babiš would have been better placed to pressure President Zeman, a fellow traveler, to invite him first to try and form a government.

‘Society remains divided’

Populism is far from over, analysts say.

ANO garnered just over 1,458,000 votes (about 27% of the vote) in the 2021 general election, while Babiš garnered more than a third of the vote in the first round of the presidential election earlier this month and 41.67% of the votes in this weekend’s second-round run-off.

In 2021, about 510,000 people voted for the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party.

And about a million voters supported a party that won no seats in parliament. “All these people will look for representation; and Babiš is the first natural choice,” Otto Eibl, the head of the political science department at Masaryk University, told Euronews.

It is therefore questionable whether the populist billionaire will wait until the next general election in 2024. Eibl thinks so.

Babiš was undoubtedly backed by a court in Prague earlier this month acquitted him of charges of subsidy fraud, just four days before the first round of the presidential election.

His party is the largest opposition group in parliament, and while Babiš doesn’t make frequent appearances in the chamber, he could become more considerate if he loses the presidency.

In its latest poll, polling agency STEM found that ANO is the most popular party by a few percentage points, while support for the ruling coalition is declining. In 2021, he lost out to two new five-party alliances that formed anything but a Babiš bloc.

“The current government is certainly not in a good situation,” Kopeček said. “It has relatively low confidence and, above all, a huge challenge in the form of a large government deficit or high inflation,”

Indeed, inflation hovered around 15.8% in December, well above the eurozone average. Fiala, the prime minister, vowed to keep a balanced budget after years of riotous spending by Babiš, but that has been wiped out by the war in Ukraine, inflation and problems on the world market (the Czech economy is expected to grow by 0.1% this year). may shrink, OECD estimates)

“Society remains very divided,” Vladimira Dvorakova, a political scientist at the Czech Technical University in Prague, told Euronews.

Perhaps this is fertile ground for Babiš to wait and make a third attempt in the 2024 general election.