The Czech Neoliberal Right Lost. Czech Trumpists Won.
The Czech elections handed victory to the Trump-like billionaire Andrej Babiš last weekend. The neoliberal right-wing incumbents did little to curb the high cost of living and again lost to a candidate who promised to do something about it.
In the national election on October 3–4, Andrej Babiš's ANO movement won the second-largest electoral victory in modern history, taking 34.51 percent of all votes. (Milan Jaros / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Czech voters have decided. After four years in power, the government led by Prime Minister Petr Fiala is coming to an end. When this traditional right-wing camp unexpectedly defeated Andrej Babiš in the 2021 elections, Czech left-wing voices warned the new government not to continue its policy of austerity. They argued that to really defeat Babiš, the government needed to focus on the less affluent sections of society and on leveling out the differences between Czech regions. The government took virtually no heed of this advice and soon became extremely unpopular. Thanks mainly to its ideological blindness, arrogance, and incompetence, the oligarch and agro-industrialist Babiš — one of the richest people in the country — is now returning to power in the name of solving ordinary Czechs’ economic ills.
Fiala’s government certainly did not have an easy time. It had to deal with a whole series of crises — supply chain and inflation crises, the energy crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the arrival of people fleeing that conflict. But it also achieved one of the worst economic performances in Europe. The Czech Republic had one of the highest inflation rates in the EU, real wages fell dramatically, housing prices rose sharply, and people had trouble paying for basic food, energy, and housing costs. It was not until the second quarter of this year that the economy began to grow slowly, and the Czech economy is now returning to its pre-2019 level after the slump.
Babiš’s ANO movement took brutal advantage of all this. In the national election on October 3–4, it won the second-largest electoral victory in modern history, taking 34.51 percent of all votes. Instead of competing with Babiš on economic issues, the outgoing government focused on geopolitical issues and the country’s affiliation with the Western sphere of influence. However, Babiš managed to sweep this off the table with several media appearances in which he labeled Russia an aggressor, Ukraine a victim, and rejected Czech withdrawal from NATO and EU structures. This effectively ended the geopolitical dispute, leaving the right-wing bloc with nothing left to play with.
This does not mean, however, that Babiš plays a positive, let alone progressive, role in Czech politics. He is still an oligarch, whose interests lie not in the emancipation of the poorest sections of Czech society, but at most in the welfare of the honest and poorly paid employees of his companies.
In fact, Babiš considers all citizens of the Czech Republic to be somehow its employees. In 2013, he ran for parliament for the first time with the slogan “Run the State Like a Company,” almost as a foretaste of developments in US politics.
Babiš offers voters managerial competence, low taxes, and the preservation of existing welfare spending. Even these unambitious and, in some respects, unrealistic goals were enough to easily defeat his right-wing competitors and drain the electorate of traditional left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats and the Communist Party, which did not offer much more than ANO in these elections.
Enough, Already
What was new, however, was that these traditional left-wing parties — a stable part of the Czech political system until the last parliamentary election in 2021 — joined forces to form a new coalition called Stačilo! (Enough!). They were not alone in this pact, which also relied on anti-Ukraine rhetoric, anti-vaccination influencers, and in some cases even openly far-right figures.
Kateřina Konečná (leader of the Communists) and Jana Maláčová (leader of the Social Democrats) openly drew inspiration from Sahra Wagenknecht’s movement in Germany, seeking a conservative and nationalist shift in Czech left-wing politics. In fact, compared to Stačilo!, even the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) in Germany had offered fairly traditional left-wing politics, fused with anti-immigration rhetoric and anti-militarism.
Stačilo! went much further. Heading the list in the Central Bohemia Region in this election was Jana Bobošíková, who ran in the previous such contest under the banner of the Workers’ Party of Social Justice — a force with an openly neo-Nazi past and dissolved by the courts in 2010 because of its support for violent activity. In the Ústí nad Labem Region, its second-placed candidate was mayor of the northern Bohemian town of Duchcov. He formed a ruling coalition there with this same Workers’ Party of Social Justice. We could find more similar figures with good relations with Czech and Slovak neo-Nazis in Stačilo! In contrast, the BSW has not yet crossed this line of direct cooperation with neo-Nazis.
For a long time, it looked like Stačilo! would get into parliament and form some kind of government with Babiš. In recent months, it had kept above 5 percent in the polls, which would have ensured it a place in parliament. In the end, however, it fell short, with 4.3 percent, and no seats. This is particularly tragic for Social Democratic chairwoman Maláčová, who pushed through the alliance with Stačilo! despite opposition from large sections of her party, arguing that it would get the Social Democrats back into parliament after four years. This did not happen, and on Monday, Maláčová announced that she, along with the party’s senior leadership, was resigning.
It turned out that part of the Stačilo! electorate decided at the last minute to support Babiš, who offered an almost identical economic program while opposing any possibility of the Czech Republic leaving the EU or NATO. It seems that even the traditionally Euroskeptic Czech society is not open to the risks that independence within Europe would bring in the current geopolitical situation. The same issue was recently also faced by the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) led by Japanese-born politician Tomio Okamura, which also proposed a referendum on leaving the EU and NATO. The anti-immigration, conservative SPD (not to be confused with Germany’s party of the same acronym) made it into parliament, but with 7.8 percent of the vote, well short of expectations.
Motoring Ahead
Given both the campaign and the rhetoric of parties such as the SPD and Stačilo!, these elections were widely framed as a geopolitical choice between East and West. However, Babiš is right in saying that, in reality, he never pursued a pro-Russian policy as prime minister. Indeed, after it was revealed that Russian GRU agents were responsible for the explosion of an ammunition depot in 2014 in Vrbětice, in the east of the country, he expelled the largest number of Russian diplomats and agents in this country’s modern history.
As the current negotiations in the new government show, the real geopolitical threat may ultimately come from a completely different direction. Babiš is currently considering some form of government cooperation with two minority, far-right parties, namely the SPD and the rather bizarre Motorists for Themselves. This latter is the latest project of former president Václav Klaus, a prominent figure in the global climate-denier movement. During his active political career, Klaus held strongly Euroskeptic views, opposed multiculturalism and the “LGBTQ+ agenda,” and, above all, cultivated strong relations with American libertarian think tanks linked to the Republican Party, such as the Cato Institute.
The Motorists for Themselves party can be seen as the Czech version of MAGA, espousing xenophobic, misogynistic views. More importantly, however, the party takes a hard neoliberal stance and, following Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), wants to radically cut Czech state spending and limit any support for environmental movements and nonprofits promoting progressive policies. The Motorists are partners of Babiš’s ANO in the far-right Patriots for Europe faction, which Babiš founded together with Hungary’s self-styled “illiberal” prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, Herbert Kickl.
This faction includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Spain’s far-right Vox, and there is also talk of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) joining. These parties make no secret of their admiration for the Trump administration, and in the future may form a significant Trumpian ally in European politics. The goal will not be to destroy the European project, as some critics warn, but to shift the EU away from social welfare toward both the far right and closer cooperation with the United States.
Just like other world leaders, Babiš is now sticking to the slogan “Czechia First,” and his inventory includes red Trump-style caps with nationalist messages. Donald Trump’s isolationist, nationalist, and corporatist policies have long been close to Babiš’s heart, and the two men share a strong entrepreneurial ethos. Babiš is also a long-time fan of Orbán, whom he admires for the way he deals with political opposition and consolidates his hegemony. Although Babiš lacks Orbán’s ideological verve and, in the atheistic Czech Republic, does not even attempt to imitate his Christian-nationalist narratives, we can expect a slow erosion of liberal-democratic institutions and the rule of law.
Second Administration
Ruling together with the Trumpian Motorists — as now seems likely, if not certain — Babiš’s authoritarian tendencies and attacks on the opposition will surely grow stronger. When Babiš ruled together with the Social Democrats from 2017 to 2021 he became a proponent of a strong state and an at least slow rise in the standard of living of the poorer sections of Czech society. However, we will not see this type of Babiš in the new government. Instead, we can expect culture wars, a battle with civil society, and the silencing of opinions that contradict his technocratic and entrepreneurial worldview. The Czechs have been haunted by the East and Russia for so long that authoritarianism has come to them from the West, which they have always looked up to.
The elections also brought some good news. After fifteen years’ absence, representatives of the Green Party, running on the Pirate Party list, entered parliament. Some incoming MPs from the Pirate Party itself advocate certain progressive policies. An opposition may begin to form that could free Czech politics from the binary struggle between the neoliberal right and authoritarian populism, and open up broader space for pro-social, emancipatory, and democratic politics. These MPs may soon be joined by defectors from the Social Democrats, the Pirates, and other smaller, non-parliamentary left-wing parties such as Levice (the Left) and Budoucnost (Future), together creating a counterweight to the two main camps that have dominated Czech politics for the last twenty years.
It is not much, but there is some hope for another kind of politics. And that is no small thing.