A billionaire former Czech Republic prime minister, Andrej Babis, seized on voters’ economic frustrations in his bid to reclaim power Saturday in parliamentary elections that could water down the country’s steadfast support for Ukraine and challenge the European Union and NATO on Russia.
Mr. Babis had linked the concerns of war-weary Czechs dealing with high consumer costs to his charge that the incumbent center-right government was spending too much on Ukraine. While the Czech economy is starting to stabilize, officials and experts said, the improvement came too late to resonate with voters.
As he now faces forming a new government — which could take weeks — Mr. Babis will have to decide how much leverage he will afford to right-wing Euroskeptics whose support he will need to push through his agenda. His party, Ano, which translates as “yes,” does not have a defined ideological bent, but leaders of the defeated center-right government have said they will not be part of an administration led by Mr. Babis, an all-things-to-all-people politician.
Mr. Babis must also contend with conflict-of-interest laws looming over his agribusiness companies before he can take office, and said on Saturday evening that he would “show a solution” to President Petr Pavel when the two men meet on Sunday.
Ano officials began popping wine corks and supporters cheered as Mr. Babis arrived to claim victory at the party’s headquarters in a suburban office complex that he owns.
“I am thrilled that we convinced people that it is only the Ano movement that has a clear vision for the future of our country,” Mr. Babis, said, exulting with 97 percent of the vote having been counted after two days of balloting that ended Saturday with a higher-than-usual turnout. He said he had not yet spoken to the outgoing prime minister, Petr Fiala.
“This is the peak of my political career, absolutely,” Mr. Babis said.
Mr. Babis, 71, has drawn comparisons to President Trump; in 2019 during his first term as prime minister, he said he wanted “to make the Czech Republic great again.” A pragmatic-to-the-point-of-transactional tycoon, he has remained popular despite being linked to numerous corruption scandals, including facing a fraud prosecution that is still underway.
Parties on the extreme ends of the Czech political spectrum want Mr. Babis to model his foreign policy more after the prime ministers of Hungary and Slovakia, who have maintained ties with Moscow and balked at E.U. sanctions against Russia and NATO military assistance for Ukraine.
Mr. Babis distanced himself from the extreme parties late in the campaign and said on Saturday that Ano wanted to govern alone, as a minority administration, after falling short of winning a majority in the Czech Parliament’s 200-seat lower chamber. Such minority governments generally run higher risks of collapsing because they depend on short-term coalitions instead of broad support for policies.
President Petr Pavel, who has considerable influence on security issues despite his largely ceremonial role, had previously warned he would block the extreme parties when a left-wing movement initially appeared likely — but failed — to give Communists a direct role in the Czech government for the first time since the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
Conceding defeat, Mr. Fiala said his government had “borne the brunt of the burden of the crises our country has been through in the last four years” — namely, a weakened global economy and the war in nearby Ukraine.
“My goal was to again create a government of democratic parties, but it is clear now that, according to the results, that won’t be possible,” he said.
Mr. Babis’s campaign capitalized on pocketbook issues: as the incumbent government sought to reduce the national debt, Czechs endured higher taxes and rising energy costs, an increase in the retirement age and slow economic growth. At the same time, the government has spent nearly $11 billion as a result of the war in Ukraine — the vast majority for refugees who fled to the Czech Republic after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022.
A tiny fraction of that money went to the multibillion-dollar ammunition initiative for Ukraine that the Czech Republic is leading, and which is overwhelmingly financed by other NATO allies. Mr. Babis has vowed to end the program, but would not answer directly when asked on Saturday if he would keep it or, as other Ano leaders have more recently suggested, push for it to be moved under the control of NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Public support for Ukraine remains strong, although recent polls show that more than half of the country worries the war will continue for years, or bring NATO into direct conflict with Russia.
“When we now fight against Russia’s regime, it cost us only money — not infrastructure, not Czech people’s lives,” Jan Saiez, 47, a former firefighter who works for the government’s interior ministry, said Friday after voting to keep the center-right government in place.
Ano leaders have opposed increasing defense spending — to 5 percent of gross domestic product as Mr. Trump has demanded — but generally acknowledge that NATO has helped Czech security. The party also has called for reforming the European Union, and opposes its migration and climate proposals, but favors remaining in the economic bloc.
Lucie Hesova, 36, an accountant from Prague’s suburbs who voted for Ano, credited NATO with keeping Russia from invading farther into Europe. But support to Ukraine “needs to be limited,” she said.
Though his party emerged triumphant, Mr. Babis’s return to the prime minister’s job is not assured.
He must either relinquish control of his estimated $4.3 billion business empire or, potentially, appoint an ally to be prime minister in his place and direct the government from behind the scenes, said Jiri Pehe, a longtime Czech political analyst. In that case, Mr. Babis’s close Ano colleague and Parliament’s deputy speaker, Karel Havlicek, would probably become prime minister.
Mr. Pehe doubted that would happen anytime soon, if ever, because “Babis will do everything in his power to be appointed prime minister.”
Daniel Hegedüs, director for Central Europe at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said Mr. Babis’s return to power would reflect an increasing polarization of voters who seesaw between illiberal populists and pro-Western democratic values, especially in Eastern Europe.
In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a liberal centrist, defeated the nationalist Law and Justice party candidate in 2023, only to see a Law and Justice president elected in 2025. And in Slovakia, the populist Prime Minister Robert Fico has returned to power twice since his first term in 2006-2010.
In the Czech Republic, “the center is basically gone,” said Mr. Pehe, who advised the country’s first president, Vaclav Havel, after Communist rule of the country ended. Even among people who welcomed democracy after the Czech revolution in 1989, Mr. Pehe said, “a lot of them are still sort of nostalgic for strong-armed rule.”
“I call it post-Communist syndrome,” he said.
Boleslav Vysin, 81, a retiree and former Soviet soldier who voted for the Stacilo coalition, which has Communist roots, said he worried that the incumbent government “has been doing everything it can to involve the Czech people in a war against Russia” by supporting Ukraine.
He met an acquaintance, Irena Benesova, 72, at a polling station in Prague after they had voted Friday. Ms. Benesova said she voted to keep current centrist leaders in power because “at least they accomplished something — unlike the previous governments.”
“When Babis was in charge, nothing happened,” she said.
As they greeted each other, Ms. Benesova asked Mr. Vysin whether he, too, had voted for the current government as “the only choice.”
“I most certainly did not vote for them,” Mr. Vysin replied.
“Well, I hope nobody will come to confiscate your house,” Ms. Benesova joked, referring to Communist policies.
Mr. Vysin worried about the specter of war if the Russia’s conflict escalates beyond Ukraine’s borders: “I’m more worried it could collapse under a nuclear bomb strike.”
Barbora Chaloupkova contributed reporting from Prague.
Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years.
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