Illustration photo – Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala.
Prague – Prime Minister Petr Fiala (ODS) was not surprised that Andrej Babiš would remain the head of the ANO movement, he told CNN Prima News in the evening. He considers the main and serious information from the press conference after the meeting of the ANO presidency to be that ANO wants to compete with extremists and win over radical voters. He warned against the combination of populism and radicalism.
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After the meeting of the ANO presidency, Babiš announced that he would remain the chairman of the movement and a member of parliament. According to him, the main faces of the opposition entity will be the head of the parliamentary club Alena Schillerová and Karel Havlíček, who will lead the new shadow government. In addition to Fial's government, former Prime Minister Babiš sharply criticized the leaders of the Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) movement, Tomio Okamura, and ČSSD, Michal Šmarda, who, according to him, betrayed the interests of their voters by directly or indirectly supporting Petr Pavel. He defeated Babiš in the January presidential elections.
According to Fiala, it became clear that ANO would be nothing without its owner and that he would continue his current policy of promising everything to everyone in the hope that the voters had forgotten. “The third thing we learned is more serious, and that is that the ANO movement wants to compete with extremists and wants to win over voters who have previously voted for radical or extreme parties,” he said. He named SPD and Communist voters, and generally mentioned other parties that did not make it to the House of Representatives in the previous elections.
The Prime Minister assumes that the standard political confrontation between the head of the government and the leader of the opposition will continue. What is dangerous is what has already been shown in the presidential campaign, that the ANO movement has turned from populist rhetoric to very radical rhetoric using lies and untruths, he said. “Populism, if it is combined with a radical position, is certainly not good news,” added Fiala.
