The previous chapter described the plans and tools that President Miloš Zeman had during his ten-year term in office. The preceding passage therefore reflects Zeman’s efforts to create a major power centre in Prague Castle and his support from Beijing, Moscow and the oligarchs to whom the strong-willed ruler owed much. Zeman could partly implement these visions directly, but partly he had to use planted figures or bargain with other figures. This chapter therefore aims to show what interests clashed between 2014 and 2021, who participated in this marketplace of interests, and what stages of development the cooperation of all the figures involved in the marketplace went through.
To make the period clear, however, we must divide them. Of course, the simplest break in a relatively long period may be the elections to the Chamber of Deputies, which took place in the autumn of 2017. Here, the voters indeed dealt the cards significantly differently than in 2013 and allowed for a significantly different arrangement of power structures, to the benefit of Andrej Babiš’s movement. But this division would not be complete. The first of the electoral periods must also be divided into roughly equal time zones. The break was not a specific event, but a shift in social opinion about Babiš himself and a shift of his movement towards a completely different electorate, and thus a complete loss of any attempt at a culturally advanced performance or factual steps to improve the situation of the Czech Republic.
