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…
Auteur: Jan Bělíček
