In just three years, Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis has managed to expand smoothly beyond business into politics and now appears poised to be a contender for prime minister. His decades of experience running successful businesses was always part of his appeal to Czech voters sick of a stale political culture riddled with corruption and graft.
But while many believe he can make a difference in the fight against what he calls "godfathers" and "Palermo", others see the potential for clashes of interests and even a dangerous concentration of power. Forbes rates Babis the second richest Czech, worth $2.5 billion, with businesses in his Agrofert group of companies spanning food, chemicals and media employing 28,000 staff. He snapped up two loss-making newspapers and a radio station last year while building his political movement, ANO.
He took on the finance ministry as part of a coalition government after ANO came in second in a parliamentary election late last year. As well as running the budget and EU subsidies, the ministry manages the state's holdings in firms from airlines to pipelines.
The Slovak-born 60-year-old can now claim to be by far the most popular politician in the Czech Republic. A nation-wide opinion poll last week gave ANO 31 percent support, ahead of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka's Social Democrats with 22.2 percent. In local elections in October, ANO claimed the top spot in the capital Prague and won in eight out of 12 other major cities, giving the party a big footprint around the country and putting Babis on track to vie for the premiership when the next election is held by 2017.
His platform is simple. Campaign posters focus on the professionalism of ANO's candidates and their clean records in a country plagued since the end of communism by scandals over the abuse of public funds. Graft watcher Transparency International ranks the Czech Republic among the most corrupt countries in Europe at 25th among 31 nations.
"What is winning is my programme and that is terribly simple: I don't lie, I don't steal and I work," Babis said in an online video interview in October.
But his combination of far-flung businesses and political power frequently invites comparisons in the media to former Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who also faced criticism for the overlap of business and political interests before he was forced out of parliament last year over a tax fraud case.
It is a comparison Babis rejects. "He had sex scandals, evaded tax and cheated the state. I do not and will not do things like that," Babis volunteered in a Reuters interview last year, even before he was asked about it. Babis did not reply to several requests for comment for this story, sent through his spokesperson. The finance ministry also did not respond to requests for comment.
Babis has complied with Czech law governing conflicts of interest and, in accordance with the law, stepped down as the executive chief of his empire, but retained ownership. What some commentators ask is whether the overlapping of economic, media and political interests is in keeping with the democratic ideals of a member of the European Union.
ANO's head of the parliamentary caucus is on Agrofert's board, the environment minister used to lead one of Agrofert's chemical firms and the nation's highway department is led by a former head of Agrofert's strategic communications. "It is a diversion from democracy in the Western sense of the word," said former anti-communist dissident Bohumil Dolezal, now a political science lecturer and commentator.
Comments
Comments are closed.