Is Trumpism exportable to Europe? Czechia may be a test case
The billionaire populist Andrej Babiš is running for his old job as prime minister.
“Of course I’m a Trumpist!” Andrej Babiš told an interviewer in late March, days before US President Donald Trump hit the global economy with an onslaught of tariffs. The former Czech prime minister—who is campaigning for his old job ahead of parliamentary elections later this year—has since been trying to backtrack, calling the tariffs “mad” and “all wrong.” But he remains a perfect avatar for Trump’s style of politics, complete with his own red hat that says “Strong Czechia.”
Like Trump, Babiš is a parvenu—extraordinarily wealthy yet deeply insecure. The agriculture and media tycoon also firmly believes his prior experience running a business empire is all he needs to govern a modern pluralistic nation. But after more than a decade in politics, he continues to be plagued by conflicts of interest. And he has little patience for the idea that values and moral scruples should get in the way of a purely transactional foreign policy.
Babiš is leading in the polls ahead of the elections, set for October. But does his example demonstrate Trumpism is an exportable model of right-wing populist politics?
Among those who say yes, the scholar Georgios Samaras says, “Trump’s legal theatrics, teamed with Musk’s free speech circus, have engineered a ludicrous blueprint for political domination” in Europe, relying on cultural change—valorizing grievances and insecurities about relative status—rather than brute political force. Indeed, there is nothing Babiš enjoys more than wallowing in his supposed victimhood at the hands of the “deep state,” or biased media—despite his years in the government’s top position and ownership of some the country’s leading newspapers.
Meanwhile, he offers little in terms of governing philosophy. “Opinion polls are the only guide to his decision-making,” says Marek Ženíšek, a member of parliament from the governing coalition, trained as a political scientist who’s currently serving as the Czech minister for science, research and innovation. “Often he just keeps quiet because he doesn’t have an answer.”
Babiš is a fundamentally post-communist political actor, not a transplant from Trump’s America. A foreign trade officer in the Czechoslovak mission to Morocco under communism, he later capitalized on his contacts in agriculture, food processing and the chemical industry as he built his behemoth company, Agrofert, in the 1990s. It is the second largest employer in the country, dominating sectors known for extraordinary dynamism and disruption, and often receives government subsidies and EU funds (especially in agriculture).
Babiš was listed as an agent of the communist secret police (“State Security” or StB) in its archives held at the Institute for National Memory in Slovakia, a publicly funded organization Babiš sued for over a decade before the Slovak government, then run by another aspiring Trumpist, Robert Fico, decided to settle in October 2024.
Babiš’s first term as prime minister, in 2017-2021, when he led a coalition government together with the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), was punctuated by divisive rhetoric but otherwise bore little resemblance to the democratic backsliding seen at the time in Hungary and Poland. Although he liked to talk about running the state as a business firm, his tenure saw no effort to substantively change the country’s institutions.
Perhaps the most controversial moment, which prompted public protests, was his appointment of a political ally named Marie Benešová as justice minister. It raised fears of possible political influence over law enforcement, particularly because prosecutors subsequently dropped charges against Babiš over business subsidy fraud.
If that sounds quaint by the standards of contemporary European and US politics, it’s because it was. Babiš’ party, ANO, was a member of Renew Europe, a grouping led by Emmanuel Macron, and the prime minister was then surrounded by figures who fell squarely within the mainstream of European politics—including Věra Jourová, a two-term European commissioner, and Pavel Telička, member of the European Parliament and former EU commissioner (he left ANO in 2017).
But something has shifted since Babiš’s defeat in elections in 2021. When he unsuccessfully ran for the more symbolic post of president in 2023, against the retired general Petr Pavel, he presented himself as a candidate of “peace,” opposing aid to Ukraine and depicting his opponent—who had enjoyed an illustrious career in NATO—as a puppet of foreign interests.
Following European parliamentary elections in 2024, ANO joined a new group, Patriots for Europe, together with Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary, Austrian Herbert Kickl’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France. While his adversarial relationship with the media is nothing new, Babiš is now explicit in his desire to bring public broadcasting under direct political control, including by making it financially dependent on the state budget instead of license fees. And because the Czech Republic’s Senate provides a check on the prime minister’s power, Ženíšek told me, “that’s why [he] repeatedly said that it is useless and that he’d abolish it.”
Just how alarmed should watchers of Central European politics be that Babiš’s possible return may herald a larger European tilt to the far right?
Neither Hungary nor Slovakia are big enough players to derail European decisions by themselves. But a tightly coordinated coalition of post-Habsburg countries, someday possibly including Austria under the FPÖ, could spell trouble for efforts to build up Europe’s military defenses, bankroll support for Ukraine and negotiate with Trump from a position of strength.
Still, even with his solid lead in the polls, Babiš would likely be unable to govern alone. The last time around, the need for a coalition with the squarely establishmentarian Social Democrats raised a solid barrier to the pursuit of his more eccentric ideas, although the years in government cumulatively reduced the ČSSD to the point of political irrelevance. While the party is currently busy fighting over whether it should join any future coalition led by Babiš, it now seems more likely the Social Democrats will stay outside parliament after not meeting the 5 percent of the vote threshold for entry.
There may be minority voices within the largest, center-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) led by the current prime minister, Petr Fiala, that would be comfortable with joining a Babiš-led government. However, that prospect seems remote, too, especially as the campaign starts to heat up.
Most other prospective junior coalition partners may be more likely to drag ANO to extremes rather than moderate its leader’s excesses. There’s Motorists for Themselves, an anti-environmentalist party close to former President Václav Klaus, an outspoken defender of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. There are Communists—now running under the name “Enough!”—and there’s Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), a far-right, anti-immigration party led by the entrepreneur Tomio Okamura. With less pressure to remain within the margins of civilized European politics than in 2017, Babiš may well opt for one of the extremists.
There are still months to go until the election. That’s a long time in politics. It was not long ago that Canada’s Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre seemed assured of winning that country’s federal election. It was enough for Poilievre to bear only a superficial similarity to Trump to derail that prospect within the first weeks of the new US administration.
Of course, the United States does not cast as large a shadow on Czech electoral politics—and the White House has hitherto refrained from making direct territorial claims on the country’s regions of Bohemia, Moravia or Silesia. But only 20 percent of Czechs trust Trump, according to a recent poll (down from 27) and 68 percent of them (including roughly the same proportion of ANO voters) oppose the Trump tariffs.
Babiš has tried to put more distance between himself and Trump as the Czech Republic and its large automotive industries are likely to be dragged into a US-engineered global slowdown, if not a recession. If he fails at that task, he may still be denied the premiership altogether.
His sudden pivot away “looks ridiculous,” Ženíšek wryly notes. “You can’t wear a red hat for six months and then start telling people that the color stood for alpenglow and not for your support of Donald Trump.”
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. X: @DaliborRohac.
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