Czech elections: governing party battles to fend off meteoric rise of Pirate party amid voter scepticism

For Benjamin Roll, chair of Million Moments for Democracy, an organisation campaigning to dethrone incumbent Czech prime minister Andrej Babis, the upcoming October elections are a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change the Czech political landscape.

In 2019, the organisation led the biggest protests the nation has seen since the fall of Communism against Babis’s leadership.

The current prime minister, one of the richest men in the country, is under police investigation over alleged conflicts of interest in the distribution of EU subsidies to Agrofert, a holding company he placed into trust funds before assuming power in 2017. The issue reared its head when Babis’s ANO party formally began its election campaign earlier this month, as the prime minister’s own son confronted his father to tell him that he would testify over the affair.

Having a leader under police investigation may seem extreme – but a string of corruption scandals since the Velvet Revolution in 1989 means many of the country’s mainstream parties are also tarnished with a similar brush. And a consequent scepticism about conventional politicians has led to a meteoric rise in popularity for the Czech Pirate Party as a key contender when voters go to the ballot box.

In the months leading up to the country’s last general election in 2017, the Pirates polled at just 5 per cent. But contesting that election against the controversial Babis saw their vote share rise to 11 per cent, and since then they have kept gaining momentum.

During the worst days of the pandemic in the Czech Republic, support for the Pirates grew to as much as 28 per cent, making them by far the country’s most popular party. Their support has dipped slightly since, but they remain the most-searched political party in the nation, according to Google data.

With a distinctively dreadlocked leader Ivan Bartos and long-term commitments to repealing copyright laws and legalising cannabis, the Pirates are a disruptive force.

And at the same time, their electoral coalition with a group of independents (Pirates+STAN) strongly favours cementing the Czech Republic’s place in the western international order. On a range of issues from climate change to the economy, the coalition wants to pursue closer cooperation with the EU, to the alarm of the current government.

“The ANO movement wants to delay the adoption of the euro, is sceptical about banning combustion engines from 2035 onwards, and about adjusting voting requirements in the European Council from unanimity to majority,” Sarka Prat, executive director of the Czech Institute for Politics and Society, told The Independent. “On the other hand, Pirates+STAN are clearly in favour of these moves.”

But Babis has spied an opportunity in their pro-western stance. He now presents his opponents as keen to import elements of western culture which concern conservative Czech voters, and has long portrayed the Pirates as the party of migration and globalisation, suggesting that the party plans to move migrants into spare rooms in privately owned properties.

“The Pirates want to map out apartments, tax the excess sq metres, and then move someone in there. Possibly some migrant,” he said.

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The Pirates took legal action against Babis over the false claim, but the prime minister has fostered a climate of scepticism in which any criticism of his party is dismissed as “misinformation” peddled by the Pirates in collaboration with “fanatics” in the European parliament.

Babis has cleverly turned the political narrative on its head, portraying himself as a man of the people under fire from a censorious international establishment.

He implies that along with its multiculturalism, the opposition also wants to import the west’s “cancel culture,” which causes considerable unease even among anti-Babis voters. Earlier this summer, he published a book called Share It Before They Ban It!

Notwithstanding the irony of a country’s leader suggesting his own book could be banned, the stunt raised the spectre of an ill-defined force aiming to cancel the prime minister. In the context of his opponents’ pro-EU stance, the book aimed to present the billionaire businessman as a freedom fighter speaking up for ordinary Czech voters.

Polls suggest that Babis’s strategy is working. Support for ANO (which means “yes” in Czech) dipped dramatically during the darkest days of the pandemic this spring, but the party is now back on top form, polling at around 27 per cent with the Pirates at around 21 per cent.

Thanks to the prime minister’s skilful self-marketing, the party’s establishment status is likely to help it form a government after the vote.

With the Czech Republic’s proportional representation system making it necessary to form coalition governments, Czech president, Milos Zeman, has already said he will give first preference in negotiations to the single political party with the highest share of the vote – meaning electoral groups such as Pirates+STAN and SPOLU, another major anti-Babis alliance, would be second in line to form a government.

Both groups have already ruled out working with ANO, so Babis may have to negotiate with more reactionary forces such as the anti-EU, anti-immigration Freedom and Direct Democracy party (SPD), or even the Communist Party, which polls at around 5 per cent in the nation.

“Since Zeman says openly that he will appoint the leader of the strongest individual party, it is almost certain that the first attempt to form a government will go to Babis,” Jiri Pehe, a former Czech cabinet member and current director of the New York University in Prague, told The Independent.

“Zeman and Babis will then try to force one or more parties from the two coalitions to join ANO,” he warned.

As the vote draws near, the Czech political establishment is mobilising against parties that want change. But the outcome will depend on whether the status quo can drown out unconventional forces posing a threat to the Babis administration.