In Czech Election, a New Threat to European Unity

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/world/europe/czech-republic-andrej-babis.html

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PRAGUE — He’s a media-wise billionaire used to getting his own way, and promising to run the government like a business. He wants immigrants to stay away. And although his political positions are tricky to pin down, they are tinged with populist and muscular rhetoric.

Andrej Babis, 63, who built an agribusiness and media empire in the ruins of the Soviet collapse, is the front-runner to become the Czech Republic’s new prime minister, running as the leader of a movement he created a few years ago for that very purpose.

“He is like Trump, really,” said Jiri Pehe, a political analyst and director of New York University in Prague. “You can watch him and see how he suffers in Parliament, forced to listen to other people.”

In a year in which Europe has teetered through a series of fateful votes — in the Netherlands, France, Britain, Germany, Spain and then this weekend in Austria — the outcome of Czech parliamentary elections on Friday and Saturday may well determine whether a fissure between the more prosperous nations of Western Europe and the increasingly authoritarian countries of the East will widen into a chasm.

In the West, nationalist and populist parties have made substantial gains in recent elections. But in the East, resentment of Brussels and resistance to immigration have helped propel such parties to power in several countries, notably Poland and Hungary. Now, the Czech Republic may join them.

Whether a wealthy oligarch with vast financial interests would prove as illiberal as Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist prime minister, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s governing right-wing party, remains uncertain in a country as secular and Western-oriented as the Czech Republic. But Mr. Babis has suggested abolishing the Czech Senate and trimming the lower house of Parliament, moves that would strengthen the executive branch.

Following a pattern that has become familiar in European elections, the Czech vote pits longstanding mainstream parties in decline against anti-establishment upstarts from all corners of the political spectrum.

The youth-dominated Czech Pirate Party, which began in 2009 by calling for using the internet to streamline democracy, has seen its support in polls cross the 5 percent threshold to qualify for Parliament.

On the far right, Tomio Okamura — a half-Czech, half-Japanese entrepreneur whose Liberty and Direct Democracy Party opposes immigration, and calls Islam an ideology rather than a religion — drew 6.9 percent in the last election and is expected to do better this time around.

Mr. Babis refers to his party, Ano, as a movement to overturn a culture of corruption among the political elite. Ano means “yes” in Czech, but it is also an acronym for Action of Dissatisfied Citizens. Its slogan is simple and vague: “Things will get better.”

Mr. Babis’s movement, formed in 2012, stunned the establishment by finishing second in parliamentary elections the following year, a strong enough showing to propel him and several supporters into major roles in a coalition government with the center-left Social Democratic Party and the center-right Christian Democratic Union. Mr. Babis served as finance minister.

But this spring, with Ano surging in popularity, the coalition fractured. Mr. Babis was investigated over possible tax crimes. His parliamentary immunity was revoked. He was fired as finance minister. And this month he was indicted on charges of misusing European Union subsidies — accusations that he calls politically motivated.

“The other parties are trying to push Babis out of politics, but it hasn’t worked,” said Pavel Fischer, the director of Stem, a nonprofit polling and research group in Prague.

President Milos Zeman, a populist with strong ties to Moscow, has said that if Ano wins, he will name Mr. Babis prime minister — even if Mr. Babis is in prison.

Ano still leads the polls, helped in no small measure by the oligarch’s grip on the Czech media. He owns or controls the two most popular newspapers, which regularly praise his efforts and denigrate opponents, as well as a popular radio station and a television network.

“He has tremendous power,” said Otto Eibl, a political scientist at Masaryk University in Brno. “So the concentration of power in Babis’s hands is enormous and some people are nervous about it. And they are right.”

But Mr. Babis has been difficult to pin down on the issues. He opposes sanctions on Russia and seeks more trade with Moscow. He does not want to adopt the euro. He is fiercely resistant to accepting refugees, especially Muslims.

He also controls a conglomerate with interests in agribusiness, forestry, food processing and chemicals that stretches across several European countries. A Bloomberg index of global billionaires puts him at No. 492, with an estimated worth of nearly $4.1 billion.

And he is careful to keep his Brussels-bashing on the vague side.

“Babis’s position on the European Union is not clear, because he is not talking about it most of the time,” Mr. Eibl said. “Sometimes he is forced to say something, but he usually avoids such topics.”

Like other former communist nations, the Czech Republic had to create new parties from scratch after the fall of the Soviet Union. Center-left Social Democrats lined up against center-right Civic Democrats, with the remnants of the Communist Party hoping for a return to power.

For more than a decade, with the economy rising at a brisk clip, voters seemed content to pass power among them. But the 2008 financial collapse shattered the equilibrium.

“Now, Czech voters are weary of traditional parties,” Mr. Pehe said. “And we see the rise of these populist movements.”

Antonin Gold, a real estate agent with no political experience, stood outside a subway station this month, wearing a badge identifying him as an Ano candidate for Parliament.

Mr. Gold said he had become so upset by news reports about yet another corruption investigation that he decided to join Mr. Babis’s movement.

“I didn’t think I could ignore it any longer, and I had to take action,” Mr. Gold said, pressing a leaflet into the hands of a woman scurrying past. He shrugged off the corruption charges as a move by the political establishment to cling to power.

Polls show Ano drawing 25 to 30 percent of the vote, well ahead of the second-place Social Democrats, though predicting the outcome is complicated.

“Many people still are not sure who they will vote for,” Mr. Fischer said. “The last days will be crucial.”

For his part, Mr. Babis has gone back and forth on comparisons with Mr. Trump, initially calling himself a much better businessman than the American president but later finding more to like in Mr. Trump’s hard line on immigration.

Mr. Okamura, of the far right, certainly sees a connection between his approach and Mr. Trump’s.

“I say we must make the Czech Republic good,” Mr. Okamura said. “Not great. I wanted to choose a word that Trump had not chosen. But of course, great would be fine.”