8.1.1. Babiš the democrat and reformer: 2013-2015

But let’s start in order and go back to the end of October 2013, when the results of the elections to the Chamber of Deputies were announced. Representatives of the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) and its chairman Bohuslav Sobotka sat in the lower chamber. The Social Democrats were followed closely by the deputies of the anti-corruption movement ANO 2011. In addition to the returning People’s Democrats, representatives of TOP09, ODS, the Communists and Okamura’s Úsvit also sat in the Chamber.

Attempted coup by Hašek

A pivotal event for the period happened just a few hours after the elections. At that time, a strange group of politicians met at the President’s house in Lány. While the top Social Democrats gathered at the People’s House and celebrated their relatively slim victory, a certain number of top CSSD leaders disappeared from the party headquarters and headed to President Zeman’s Lány Castle. Let us recall that Miloš Zeman was at that time in control of Rusnok’s government. So a plan was hatched to keep Zeman’s crucial influence on the government and a bunch of party mates disloyal to Sobotka would take over the government instead of the party chairman. Michal Hašek, then first deputy chairman of the ČSSD, was at the head of the conspiracy. Other co-conspirators were Jeroným Tejc, Milan Chovanec, Zdeněk Škromach and Jiří Zimola. Despite clear evidence of the event, which entered the media space under the name “Lánský puč”, all participants denied its existence. In those days, the participants in the treacherous community lied so strongly that if the lie had actually been smoked out of their mouths, the people with Hašek in the lead would have had to buy a significant number of emission allowances. Hašek was subsequently brought down by one of the participants, Milan Chovanec. For this role in the story, in which he first betrayed Sobotka and then betrayed his co-conspirators, he earned the nickname “traitor of traitors.” As an apparent reward for betraying his co-conspirators, he was later given the Ministry of the Interior to administer.

At the beginning of the story about the Lansko Stagecoach, we wrote that it was one of the most interesting events. A legitimate question is why? The remarkable attitude is not an attempt to defeat his fellow party members Sobotka and Hašek, nor is it an attempt by Zeman to extend a certain power superiority over the government and to take revenge on the hated Sobotka. Andrej Babiš’s move is remarkable. He must have assessed very well that his role in the emerging coalition, dependent on the whims of the castle’s mocipal, would be marginal. Under these circumstances, Zeman and his minion Hašek would hold the power, while Babiš and his movement and the complementary People’s Party would play second or third fiddle. Thus, in the upcoming negotiations, Babiš and Pavel Bělobrádek were not dealing with Hašek’s clique, but with Sobotka’s wing. One of the related thoughts that Babiš had to chew over at the time was whether he wanted to have the very uncharismatic and weak Sobotka or Zeman’s ally Hašek in the government.

In any case, Hašek’s initiative was suppressed, among other things thanks to Babiš’s purposefully characteristic attitude. The government was formed in January and, with the exception of the arch-traitor – the Pilsen crook Chovanec – none of the conspirators sat in it. Babiš became the number two alongside Sobotka, and the Christian Democrats added three seats to the two government parties. It is not without interest for the future of the government that although the Social Democrats had the most ministers, Babiš and the KDU had the majority.

Anti-corruption and reform movements

Let’s make a probe into Babiš’s soul at this point. What kind of person Andrej Babiš is, involved in all kinds of shenanigans and dirty things, forms a large part of this book. What is not apparent from other passages in the book, however, is what drove him into politics. The fundamental fallacy is the idea that the driving force behind Babiš’s actions is merely the accumulation of money or wealth. Even property, whether in the form of cash or bank accounts, holdings in companies, real estate or even a collection of antique artefacts, is not a goal for Babiš. What people with his psyche turn to and desire is power. Yes, the resources he collects and controls will either actually or perceivedly convey power to him. People like him, desiring power as a result of some psychic distortion, also quantify it for simplicity’s sake. Someone counts his money and measures himself in rankings with other businessmen; another quantifies his power, for example, in terms of the number of people he can directly control, who are on his payroll or whom he can shake down at any time, or as those who look up to him. The sum of certain factors related to superiority over others and the idea that he feeds these people and they admire him is one of the power factors that Babiš has in his head. He entered politics around 2010, and after the purchase of the big media houses and the outcome of the elections in the autumn of 2013, he sniffed at the idea that the voters also admire him. The electorate at that time was not made up of a mass of people he sincerely despised; on the contrary, he at least respected them. They were disgruntled former ODS, VV or TOP 09 voters, people who were better educated, richer and relatively powerful. At this time, Babiš was trying to hold on to these voters, to keep his pre-election promises and to reform the state as the godfather structures had left it. He wanted these voters to admire him even more, so that he could bask in popularity among businessmen, university students and civil servants and adapt his plans accordingly.

First and foremost, Babiš, as finance minister, bet on the topic of taxes. He and his deputy at the time, Simona Hornochová, began unprecedented reforms in several areas. The interlocking changes in VAT, the prevention of carousel (circular) fraud by means of a single VAT declaration, electronic sales registration or the possibility of penalties for untraceable acquisitions of large assets were topics that Babiš sold to the general public on a daily basis. Combined with a very decent economic situation, he was able to increase state revenues sufficiently, and in the form of wage increases he was able to begin to oblige, for example, state employees, whether they were police officers, teachers, health workers or civil servants. Voters independent of the state were in turn fascinated by the fiscal trend, whereby the budget was approximately balanced for several years in a row. Proposing changes in the regulation of gambling, certain anti-corruption laws (whistleblowing, changes in the regulation of public procurement or transparent management of state property) could then attract the attention of NGOs, which in turn could report to their sympathisers from among a similar electorate about the unprecedented progress that society had been waiting for for many years. Babiš was happy to meet people from NGOs frequently, constantly repeating that he had achieved changes that had not been achieved for twenty years, and creepingly accusing his larger coalition partner of doing nothing. 

This period in 2014/2015 was probably the happiest in Babiš’s life: his agribusiness was thriving, his political career was growing, ANO’s preferences were growing, people controlled by Babiš were sitting in the European Parliament, and few people were concerned about the economic background of Babiš’s involvement. To the European success we must add the municipal elections in the autumn of 2014, when people like Adriana Krnáčová, Tomáš Macura and Petr Vokřál became the heads of large cities.

However, these virtual and real successes, which Babiš and his PR and media machine presented and thanks to which ANO’s preferences grew, did not arise on their own. The things that made the movement popular were created by the people the oligarch surrounded himself with at the time. Among Babiš’s ministers at the time, let us mention Prof. Helena Válková, later Robert Pelikán, Dan Ťok, Vera Jourová, and prominent MPs such as Prof. Jiří Zlatušek, MEPs such as Pavel Telička, and deputy ministers such as Jan Gregor and the aforementioned Simona Hornochová. These people were able to earn many times their money elsewhere and came to the state apparatus because they believed that it made sense at the time and that the visions they dreamed of could be achieved together. And they themselves, in their social bubble and on social networks, supported Babiš’s entire empire.

The oligarch’s dream of growing power without a ceiling and the favour of the voters he did not despise has come true.

Heron’s break

Perhaps Babiš thought that the period of unlimited growth would last forever. However, as we know from Czech folk wisdom, this is not true, because no tree grows to the sky. Practically everyone knew that the then finance minister was no saint and that his growth in wealth and influence was due to dishonesty. However, the situations that a literate voter could absorb from projects like the Yellow Baron were thrown on the scales by these voters, where the imaginary counterweight was the recently experienced memories of the criminal set-up with the godfathers and Nagyova at its head. For this reason, it took some two years before Babiš’s bowl of sin began to sink in the eyes of the previously selected electorate.

The trigger for the shift in popularity was the media coverage of the Čapí hní nest case. Simply, why should anyone vote for a scoundrel who milked public budgets like the godfathers of yore, hundreds of thousands of former voters from 2013 thought at the time. If the watchdogs then smell a stink, they keep looking. Subsequent information about Babiš’s use of crown bonds, the leaking of earnings from German Agrofert companies in an advertisement on Čapí nezdo (Stork’s Nest), and countless other minor shenanigans by which Babiš and his family came into some extra funds started a spiral of further changes. When it became clear what Babiš was, the thinking people started to leave him and were replaced by dull-witted loyal puppets. The repeatedly mentioned architect of the streamlining of tax collection, Hornochová, was replaced by Alena Schillerová, a creature without any deeper interest except where to harm Babiš’s enemies and stifle the budding problem of the adoring boss. After the conflict at the Justice Ministry, Hana Marvanová packed her papers and left for the bar. Věra Jourová vacated her seat as minister in the Old Town Square to Karla Šlechtová. Jan Gregor, the long-serving budget administrator, quickly left for the Court of Auditors in Luxembourg. And when Babiš liquidated the likes of Lukáš Wagenknecht, he pitted against him a large part of the NGO sector from which this deputy came.

And the spiral spun faster and faster. When someone puts fools in charge, it’s no wonder they make one mistake after another. The result is that of the original voters who entrusted their vote to Babiš in the October 2013 elections, few repeated it four years later. Babiš’s analytical team therefore had to come up with a complete change of strategy. Instead of promoting real achievements in the form of solving the debts of the past, the ANO movement began targeting the electorate of less educated and poorer voters. They did not care how many tax, economic and other shenanigans Babiš had committed in the past and what embarrassing transactions Schillerová had made to save a few hundred thousand on her apartment rent. These voters cared practically only about how much VAT would be charged on beer, how much the pension would be raised, and whether Babiš would present a plan to shorten the trip to the cottage in a few years.

In the first months of 2017, in addition to the escalation of Babiš’s problems described earlier, three other notable events occurred. First of all, the legal situation in the Slovak courts regarding Babiš’s aesthetics deteriorated. In addition, recordings of Babiš instructing journalists from his own Mladá Fronta Dnes on how to handle sensitive and fraudulently obtained information appeared on the internet. Last but not least, at the beginning of that year, an amendment to the Conflict of Interest Act, the so-called Babiš lex, came into force, under which a defined circle of politicians cannot own media outlets and their companies cannot participate in public contracts or receive subsidies. Babiš reacted to the new legislation by putting his companies into trust funds and pretending that it was solved this way. The fact that he continued to control the companies in question through the people he installed was already obvious to everyone at the time.

A set of Babiš’s skeletons, accumulated in the closet, resulted in a very remarkable constitutional situation at the turn of April and May 2017. Prime Minister Sobotka first spoke of the resignation of the entire government, only to subsequently submit to President Zeman in early May a proposal to dismiss Andrej Babiš as finance minister. This change of position did not go without a reaction from Zeman. Instead of acting, as the constitution commands, to dismiss Babiš, he came up with a typical Zeman-esque prank: he set the scene for the resignation of Sobotka’s government. In the awkward scene that followed, during which he waved his wand around Sobotka, nothing was resolved. For the next weeks, Zeman refused to accept Sobotka’s proposal for Babiš’s dismissal, arguing misleading theories such as that such a proposal was inconsistent with the coalition agreement. Zeman did not recall Babiš until the end of May.

Andrej Babiš then did not slack off, during the subsequent period he arranged a wedding with his longtime girlfriend Monika, toured the republic, promised his newly defined group of voters mountains and mines, rubbed shoulders with his former coalition partner, and prepared for the time when he would become the new prime minister.

Starosocani

However, in the period of the first government in which the ANO movement participated, it is impossible to ignore various other influences in terms of the mission of this book. In other words, Andrej Babiš was not the only one who tried to enrich himself in every possible way. If we look at the composition of the government at the time, there are several nests in relation to which we cannot speak of showcases of transparency. The style of behaviour of Milan Chovanec, Jan Mládek or Marcel Chládek, for example, takes us back to the time of the governments of their party colleagues, such as Stanislav Gross or Jiří Paroubek. We can therefore speak of these people as ‘old-boys’. It is worth at least briefly mentioning illustrative examples of the practices involved. For example, the completely non-transparent awarding of contracts for revitalisation and remediation works to Diamo from the Ministry of Industry and Trade, managed by Jan Mládek, or the “new” approaches to straightening out the financing of sport from the ministries of Marcel Chládek and Kateřina Valachová.

We must also not forget the influence of other people outside the seats of government. We have mentioned Radek Pokorny, a friend of Prime Minister Sobotka, in connection with Bakala’s privatisation shenanigans, and Michal Hašek, the former governor of the South Moravian region and the record holder in the number of positions he held, was not without influence in the Social Democrats.