Timothy Garton Ash
The likely new government in Prague will add one more state opposed to the EU’s green deal, and migration and asylum pact
Leader of the ANO movement, Andrej Babis holds a press conference at ANO headquarters after the polling stations of Czech elections closed in Prague, Czech Republic on October 4, 2025
If you open your window on a quiet street in central Prague, the first sound you hear is the trrrrk-trrrrk-trrrrk of carry-on suitcases trundling across paving stones, as tourists walk to their hotel or Airbnb (the Czech capital had 8 million visitors last year). As they trek around Prague Castle and fill the Old Town bars with cheerful chatter, these visitors—many of them probably unaware of the recent election victory of right-wing populist nationalist parties—may think this is just another normal European country. And you know what: they will be right.
Some more extensively informed newspaper commentators, reaching for an attention-grabbing generalisation, tell a different story. This is eastern Europe reverting to type, they say. After Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, now the Czech Republic as well! The truth is more interesting—and more worrying.
Thirty-six years ago, at the time of the “velvet revolution” in autumn 1989, people in Prague would constantly tell me they just wanted theirs to be a “normal” country. By normal, they meant like Britain, France, (West) Germany, Italy or Spain. Well, now it is. It’s just that the normality has shifted in the meantime. Back then, the prevailing Western normal was liberal, internationalist, pro-European; now it’s increasingly anti-liberal, nationalist and Eurosceptic. In the Czech election campaign, the incumbent prime minister, Petr Fiala, tried to mobilise Czech voters by asking: “Do we want to move towards the east or towards the West?”. But what does that mean, when the west is the US president, Donald Trump, and the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, not to mention Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) and France’s National Rally (RN) all currently leading in opinion polls?
The likely next prime minister, Andrej Babis, leader of the election-winning Ano (“Yes”) party, is a billionaire businessman who has used his great wealth to make a remarkable political career. He has already been prime minister from 2017-21. Troubled by legal proceedings for allegedly corrupt past dealings, he is not a man of deep ideological convictions but an “entrepreneurial populist” who goes where the votes are. Remind you of anybody? Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi perhaps? Or Trump.
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