Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis narrowly defeated in parliamentary elections

Published on : Modified :

Andrej Babis’ party, the populist movement ANO, in power for four years, came second in the poll on Saturday behind the center-right alliance Ensemble.

It is an earthquake in Czech political life. The center-right alliance Ensemble narrowly won the legislative elections on Saturday 9 October against billionaire populist Prime Minister Andrej Babis, according to almost complete results.

The partial results published by the official electoral website gave Andrej Babis comfortably in the lead, in accordance with the polls, but the gap melted and the result tilted as the ballots in the big cities were counted.

After more than 99.9% of the votes were counted, the Ensemble alliance bringing together the right-wing Civic Democratic Party, TOP 09 (center-right) and the Christian Democratic Union (center), obtained 27.78% of the votes , securing 71 seats. It is ahead of the ANO populist movement led by Andrej Babis, which won 27.14% and would obtain 72 seats.

Together, whose leader positioned himself immediately to form the next government, would have a 108-seat majority in Parliament (which has 200 elected officials) if it forms a larger coalition with the anti-system Pirate Party and the centrist movement of Mayors and Independents (STAN).

“It looks like the two democratic coalitions will manage to get a parliamentary majority, which most likely means Babis will have to leave,” said Otto Eibl, director of the political science department at Masaryk University in Brno.

A fourth party will sit in parliament, the far-right and anti-Muslim movement Liberty and Direct Democracy (SPD), led by Tokyo-born businessman Tomio Okamura, who won nearly 10% of the vote and should be able to count on 20 elected officials.

The turnout reached over 65%, compared to 60.84% ​​in the previous legislative elections in 2017.

Andrej Babis, 67, made his fortune in the food industry, chemicals and media. He is accused of alleged fraud on European subsidies and the European Union accuses him of a conflict of interest between his roles as businessman and politician.

The Pandora Papers international investigation, published on October 2, found that it had used money from its offshore companies to finance the purchase of properties in the south of France in 2009, including a castle. Andrej Babis rejected all these allegations, crying out for defamation.

According to Otto Eibl, the revelations of the Pandora Papers did not particularly weigh in the vote: “There were so many cases of corruption that many voters became indifferent to it,” he said.

Andrej Babis currently chairs a minority government with the Social Democrats, tacitly supported by the Communist Party which ruled the former totalitarian Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989.

Communists excluded from Parliament

With a score of 3.6%, the Communists did not cross the 5% mark on Saturday and will be excluded from Parliament for the first time since World War II.

“It’s a big thing, finally!”, Commented to AFP Alexandr Vondra, member of the European Parliament, anti-Communist dissident in the 1980s.

“But it’s also the end of Andrej, and it’s even bigger,” added Alexandr Vondra, a close associate of former Czech President Vaclav Havel.

Constitutionally, it is up to the pro-Russian President Milos Zeman to appoint the new Prime Minister. Before the election, he had hinted that he would choose Andrej Babis, his former ally.

Sick, President Zeman was forced to vote from home but his entourage said on Saturday that he would meet Andrej Babis for talks on Sunday morning.

“We will see what the president says,” said the outgoing prime minister. “I am a manager, my place is in the government”, he insisted in front of the journalists.

But the president of the Ensemble alliance, Petr Fiala, for his part declared, to ovations, that his mandate to form the next government was “strong”. “The president will have to take this into account,” he insisted.

With AFP