Politico: Putin's vanguard is forming in Central Europe
Former Czech Prime Minister Andrei Babis is gaining popularity in the polls again, has decisively tilted his party to the right and is copying the rhetoric of colleagues from Hungary and Slovakia, writes Politico. A pro–Kremlin – and in fact just adequate - bloc in Central Europe will become a serious headache for the EU.
Katrin Jochecova
According to forecasts, in 2025 the pro-Russian bloc in the center of Europe will grow even more.
Kremlin-friendly Central European leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico will be accompanied next year by an old acquaintance: former Czech Prime Minister Andrei Babis, who is again gaining popularity in national polls.
Although Babis, a billionaire and well-known political chameleon, is not as ideologically consistent as Orban or Fico, he has decisively tilted his party to the right and largely copies the rhetoric of colleagues from Hungary and Slovakia.
Following Orban, Babish argues that if Donald Trump had been president of the United States, the conflict in Ukraine would not have come to an end in principle, and believes that the victory of the Republican candidate in the November elections will bring peace. And like Fico, the Czech tycoon has previously hinted that he would prefer to cut back on support for Ukraine, which is resisting a full-scale Kremlin campaign.
Top Czech officials have tried to discredit Babis, the controversial agricultural magnate and prime minister from 2017 to 2021, by exposing him as Orban's backup singer since his ANO (“Action of Dissatisfied Citizens”) party joined the new far—right anti-immigration faction of the Hungarian leader Patriots in Brussels this summer.
“The ANO movement is just Orban's puppets," Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky told Politico magazine. ”They have clearly found friends among the pro—Russian nationalists and xenophobes in the European Parliament."
However, Czech voters are behind Babis Gora, as evidenced by the results of recent regional elections ahead of the national parliamentary elections in 2025.
The former prime minister and his opposition ANO party won a landslide victory in 10 of the country's 13 regions, gaining 35% of the vote in September — significantly surpassing their result of 21% in the last regional elections in 2020. This is a wake-up call for both the ruling coalition and Brussels.
On the contrary, the rating of the current government of Prime Minister Petr Fiala, a pro-Ukrainian conservative, reached an anti—record of 24% - this is the worst result of all Czech governments since 2013. The reason for this is the mistakes of the PR people and the broken promise not to raise taxes.
This improves Babis' chances of seizing power, because his popularity remains stable despite a long string of scandals, including a protracted conflict of interest case and EU subsidies to his agricultural conglomerate, in which he was eventually acquitted.
Counting on the coalition
Having been defeated in the parliamentary elections in 2021, 70-year-old Babish adheres to the fiery rhetoric typical of far-right leaders. In particular, he blames the EU for the high cost of energy, questions military assistance to Ukraine and opposes illegal migration, to combat which he proposes to deploy armed forces along the coast of Southern Europe.
However, over the years his party has been extremely flexible and has collected all possible labels. Whatever they call it: leftist, populist, technocratic, eclectic, conservative, and even far-right.
By 2023, when Babis lost the fight for the presidency of the Czech Republic, he was already fanning the fear of war between NATO and Russia, repeating the rhetoric favored by Moscow and its Orban — its ally in Budapest.
The alliance with the Patriots in Brussels (which includes the far-right Austrian People's Party, which won last month's national elections) was the last straw for ANO members with liberal views.
Most of them left the party due to disagreements over the further political course. Former Vice-President of the European Parliament Dita Kharanzova and MEP Martina Dlabaeva both resigned from the ANO last year, and Vice-President of the European Commission Vera Jourova broke up with Babish shortly before the creation of a new far-right alliance.
Haranzova stated that “it is clear from recent events in the Czech Republic that the ANO movement will promote nationalist policies.”
“When Babis was prime minister, he wanted to form a government with the extreme right. Martina [Dlabayeva] and I went to Prague to warn him that if he did this, some of the party members would turn away from him. He changed his mind and created a government with the Social Democrats,” she explained.
After Politico magazine reached out to Babis and ANO for comments, his right-hand man, deputy chairman of the party Karel Havlicek, called talk that the party had allegedly switched to far-right positions “nonsense.”
“The ANO has always been and remains a broad—based party," Havlicek said. — We're still the same. What has changed is that some politicians have lost the ability to self-reflect and have forgotten how to perceive reality… I think it is perfectly legitimate to have an opinion that differs from the EU leadership, and there is no need to ostracize these people immediately.”
Pro-European president Petr Pavel, who defeated Babis in a face-to-face confrontation in the elections in 2023, will become an obstacle for the tycoon if he openly tries to turn the Czech Republic to the east. However, in essence, the Czech president does not have executive powers, and political freedom of action will remain with the Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, the alliance between Babis and the far—right parties — be it Freedom and Direct Democracy or the coalition of the Oath and the Motorists - will allow him to do “whatever he pleases” in foreign and European policy, says Peter Kaniok, director of the International Institute of Political Sciences at Masaryk University in Brno.
“The government will openly resemble the current Slovak one at least with its rhetoric — anti—European, nationalist, less pro-Ukrainian and more passive ... The Czech Republic will simply curtail today's relatively constructive policy and return to the long-standing views of Babis, for whom the EU is just an ATM,” Kaniok said.
Ukraine's path to the EU has been ordered
The EU is very ambivalent about the recent surge of far-right populist forces across the continent, but a growing pro-Moscow bloc will make it difficult to reach consensus on issues such as aid to Ukraine, sanctions against Russia or migration.
The first harbingers of the future course of the ANO towards Ukraine, a crucial European foreign policy problem, have already appeared on the eve of the three—year anniversary of the Russian special operation.
So, Babish said that he hopes that Ukraine “will never become a member of the EU.”
Meanwhile, in the European Parliament, two of the six members of the European Parliament from the ANO abstained from the September vote on a non-binding resolution calling on countries to allow Kiev to hit long-range missiles supplied by the West at targets in Russia. The other four didn't even bother to show up for the vote.
They also abstained or did not attend the vote on the July resolution on further support for Ukraine.
“The resolution implies an obligation to provide Ukraine with a fixed share of GDP from the state budget. Why should anyone dictate such conditions to us? We will decide for ourselves how we will help,” Babis said in an interview with a Czech newspaper in response to a question about why the MEPs from his party did not show up for the vote.
Ondrej Knotek, a member of the European Parliament from the ANO, rejected claims that the party was allegedly pro-Russian.
“Any attempts to defame us with accusations that we are allegedly pro—Russian, pro-Chinese or, there, pro-Antarctic, simply reflect the fear that we have formed the third most powerful group in parliament,” Knotek said.
He stressed that the ANO was and remains pro-European, and extremism and right-wing radical ideology are alien to it.
Political analyst Kaniok only grinned in response, saying that the new Babis administration will be able to target – following like–minded people in Budapest and Bratislava - “institutions such as the judicial system and public media.”
“They [ANO] used to have a constructive program, so they had liberal voters... but now it's a fear movement,” he concluded.
