Populism takes centre stage

“One of the things that has surprised me is the hyped atmosphere during the campaign that even escalated into vulgar and violent behaviour against the main candidates,” says Tomas Cirhan, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University in Brno.

“This is of course not completely novel, but the intensity is striking,” he tells BIRN in his assessment of a heated, polarising and largely negative campaign that saw – among other lowlights – Prime Minister Petr Fiala facing regular verbal insults or opposition leader Andrej Babis physically attacked by a crutch-wielding man during a campaign event. While not the only culprit, Russia’s massive disinformation and propaganda efforts – meant to sow doubt and division rather than support a specific party – have also contributed to poisoning a public space that is now more toxic and divisive than ever.

Four years after a make-shift coalition of five pro-democratic forces narrowly beat agro-billionaire Babis’s ANO movement on a promise of returning decency in politics and firmly anchoring the Central European country in Western institutions, the nation appears bitterly divided and the political debate wretched.

Facing abysmal ratings and just around 20 per cent of voting intentions, the ruling right-wing Spolu coalition has gone to great lengths to frame the ballot as an existential battle for the future of the country. “It’s about where the Czech Republic will go. Whether we remain as a strong democracy, with full freedom, with prosperity, a country that is firmly part of the West… or whether we drift somewhere to the East,” Fiala warned during the campaign.

“The Spolu campaign waged everything on the moral appeal of their voters being ‘on the right side’ – I expected their campaign to culminate with something more tangible,” Cirhan complains, echoing many experts’ warnings that such polarising rhetoric – demonising political opponents along with hundreds of thousands of their voters – does little in the way of promoting a healthy democratic culture.

According to Petra Vodova, assistant professor at the political science department of the University of Hradec Kralove, “to some extent, yes, I would agree that this election reflects a broader clash between pro-Western and pro-Russian worldviews”. However she also highlights important distinctions between parties commonly included in the latter group, from the “most radical” Communist-led Stacilo to ANO’s “deliberately vague programmatic messaging”.

“You don’t have to love Spolu, you don’t have to like me personally, but the reality is that if the votes are diluted, Andrej Babis will form the [next] government,” Fiala stated at the launch of the final phase of his campaign last month, stoking large parts of the electorate’s deep-rooted antipathy towards the former billionaire prime minister in the hope that many will opt to vote for what they see as “the lesser of two evils”.

But – crutches notwithstanding – it’s been largely plain sailing for Babis and his ANO party. Week in, week out, polls have given his populist, Eurosceptic, anti-immigration movement between 30 and 35 per cent of voting intentions.

After four years of austerity-driven reforms and financial hardship, many voters are willing to turn a blind eye to Babis’s spotty track record, a first stint as premier marked by a catastrophic handling of the Covid pandemic, his endless judicial run-ins and oligarchic tendencies, and a shift to the far right that places him, at the EU level, in league with the bloc’s most notorious illiberal, pro-Russian leaders, including Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

As satirist and writer Dominik Landsman summed up for Seznam Zpravy: “If Andrej Babis shoots an orphan or eats a puppy, his voters will still say ‘better than Fiala’.”

While unoriginal, the tried-and-tested recipe of that appeal – together with the government’s unpopularity; the population’s Ukraine war fatigue; criticism of the EU, especially the Green Deal and immigration policies; vague promises to solve the cost-of-living crisis and restore households’ purchasing power; and a comforting pledge to put Czechs first – has put the Straka Academy, the seat of government in Prague, once more within his reach.

“I have a feeling that [ANO voters] are ready to make a trade-off between the amount of money in their wallets, and the basic values of the democratic institutions in the Czech Republic,” Otto Eibl, a political scientist at Masaryk University, warned on Radio Prague.