What do you do when one of your party’s lawmakers is accused of trying to hire a hitman to kill her ex-husband’s new girlfriend’s dog — but you still want to be prime minister?
Andrej Babiš, the Czech election front-runner and a seasoned scandal dodger, has a plan: Show the pooches some love. And do it before parliamentary elections take place in early October.
The uproar sparked by MP Margita Balaštíková, who was rumored to be in the frame for agriculture minister in a future Babiš government, strikes a particularly sensitive chord in a country where at least 42 percent of households own a dog, one of the highest rates in the EU.
Balaštíková was dropped from an election candidate list after Czech news outlet Seznam Zprávy published recordings in which she appeared to discuss using her connections to destroy her ex-husband’s company and hire someone to kill the dog belonging to his new partner.
Before deleting her profile, Balaštíková said on Facebook that the recordings had been manipulated, stating she had done no such thing. The dog in question is alive.
“The fact that all these lies have surfaced right now is, to me, a clear sign that it’s an attempt to damage the ANO movement [that Babiš leads] ahead of the elections, and perhaps also to distract from a number of government scandals. I truly don’t want to harm the ANO movement, and I won’t — which is why I’ve decided to immediately suspend my membership,” Balaštíková wrote.
The Czech police said in a post on X that they are looking into the matter.
Babiš later criticized Balaštíková, saying “we can’t have people like that in the movement.”
“Of course Balaštíková messed up. You just can’t talk like that … Unfortunately, it’s her mistake and I dealt with it right away, because we all love animals,” Babiš told voters at one of his pre-election meetings.
POLITICO contacted both ANO and Balaštíková for comment, but did not receive a response.
Babiš and his right-wing populist ANO party lead in the latest polls carried out by the Prague-based STEM research institute with 32.5 percent support, while the ruling Spolu (Together) coalition lags behind on 20 percent. The far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) is in third spot with 12.5 percent.
To keep it that way, Babiš brought out the big dogs.
On Friday, just a few days after the scandal erupted, Babiš gathered some of his supporters —several of whom brought dogs — in sweltering heat to climb Lysá hora, the highest mountain in the Moravian-Silesian Beskids in eastern Czechia.
Photos and videos from the hike then filled the politician’s Facebook page.
Another photo, from a pre-election meeting with voters in Kolín, saw Babiš petting a dog; a separate post showed a dog drinking from a bowl attached to an ANO campaign banner that read: “Take a sip with Betyna.”
Betyna is a dog that belongs to Babiš’ right-hand man and ANO Vice Chair Karel Havlíček, who called the scandal unacceptable and said “it affects” him “all the more” as he is “a big fan of dogs.”
The Balaštíková story contains faint echoes of the 2024 confession of Kristi Noem, now the U.S. secretary of homeland security, that she had once shot dead a misbehaving dog. The admission sparked a major backlash in the country.
The publicity maneuvers are an integral part of Babiš’ PR, according to Otto Eibl, a political scientist at Masaryk University in Brno.
“Babiš regularly surrounds himself with animals; it’s nothing new for him, nothing suddenly staged ‘for effect.’ Of course, it can also serve as damage control, but it doesn’t feel forced—there’s authenticity in it,” Eibl said, adding that animals are an important part of politics as they humanize politicians.
“It would be different if voters didn’t like those particular animals. In that case, they wouldn’t play such a role and politicians wouldn’t show them. But Czechs are a nation of dog and cat lovers, so it makes sense to show and use animals,” he added.
The Civic Democratic Party (ODS), headed by current Prime Minister Petr Fiala and part of the Spolu coalition, used the dog-killing plot as an opportunity to attack Babiš and his party.
“Will your dogs be safe … if ANO comes to power?” ODS asked darkly in one social media post.
But Babiš will likely remain confident ahead of October’s vote, having escaped Houdini-like from far bigger scandals such as allegations of kidnapping his own son and an ongoing €2 million EU subsidy fraud saga.
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