Earlier this month, as polls opened, I met a 90-year-old babushka as she inched her way to the nearest booth with the aid of two walking sticks. Having endured the horrors of the 20th century, she was determined to use her vote to block the resurgence of “evil”. Young people flocking to the extremes of Left and Right made her “sick and sad,” she explained, “because they don’t understand how much progress we have made.” When the results were declared the next evening, the Communists were effectively wiped out, failing to breach the 5% threshold to secure seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Czech Parliament. The far-Right SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy), having entered the election with 20 seats, returned with 15.

The nominal winner of the race — which produced no decisive victor — is ANO, a party bereft of coherent ideology. Its founder, Andrej Babiš, is an “anythingarian”: a highly adaptable Slovak-born billionaire who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021 and calls himself a “Czech-first” nationalist. His rivals cast Babiš as a threat to Czech security, a soft-on-Russia comrade of Viktor Orbán’s who would terminate Prague’s vital military assistance to Ukraine. His victory is being portrayed as a boost to “populism”.

The fundamental mistake of this view is its underlying supposition that Babiš’s politics are animated by conviction. In reality, Babiš fashions his beliefs in accordance with the prevailing mood. He is an insider who advertises himself as an outsider, a Croesus who has proclaimed himself the tribune of the abandoned masses. He is a consummate salesman, transactional to his marrow. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, Babiš put on a red baseball cap  modeled on MAGA, inscribed with the slogan Strong Czechia. He relished being called the “Czech Trump” and bragged about his multiple meetings with Trump.

But once Trump lost to Joe Biden, Babiš swiftly discarded the MAGA imagery. Unlike, say, Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s president, or indeed Orbán himself, Babiš is not a fixture in the MAGA galaxy. During the campaign he explicitly dissented from Trump’s demand to NATO members to raise their defense spending to 5% of GDP. He also kept his distance from Orbán.

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In opposition, Babiš had intuited that, for all the adulation directed at the Czech Republic for arming Kyiv and sheltering Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war, ordinary people were suffering under a program of austerity instituted to pay down the national debt. He saw an opening and seized it. Questioning why Prague was lavishing largesse on a foreign country while inflicting privations on its own citizens earned him the contempt of Europeans. But it also appealed to a sizable segment of the Czech electorate, the only constituency that mattered to Babiš as he plotted his return to power.

He was not, however, a one note candidate. He tantalized the electorate with an array of promises — handouts to the elderly and the young; lower taxes and energy tariffs; tax cuts and higher wages — that many Czechs found hard to resist. Even his party’s acronym, which means “yes”, radiates this all-encompassing brand of pragmatism.

Yet if ANO received the largest share of the vote, it failed to win an absolute majority. What is remarkable about this election is not only the return of Babiš; it is also the collapse of the center — that political area of compromise and alignment that makes a democracy governable. The Czech Republic is self-woundingly riven: no party, faction or alliance can claim to speak for a clear majority of the people. Years of austerity, uneven distribution of prosperity between Prague and the regions, and disillusionment with the political class, have worsened the divisions between urban and rural voters, the young and the old, the winners and the losers of the post-1989 generation.

In 2021, the specter of Babiš’s re-election, unifying liberal and conservative forces in opposition to him, gave rise to Spolu, an ideologically kaleidoscopic coalition that succeeded in keeping him out of office. After four years in government, Spolu looked bleached of purpose. Its leader, Petr Fiala, a bespectacled, button-down conservative, won plaudits in Brussels for his unwavering solidarity with Ukraine, but struggled to stabilize the unsteady economy at home, where he presided over soaring inflation, flat wages, and a housing crisis. A traditionalist who believes that marriage can only “be the union of a man and a woman”, he fell out last year with the Pirate Party — the most socially liberal member of the ruling coalition — when he sacked its leader, precipitating the Pirates’ exit.

Once the Pirates left, Spolu crawled further to the Right. And, as elections approached, Fiala was deeply unpopular: polls showed nearly four-in-five Czechs distrusted him. Unable to defend his record, his side attacked Babiš as a Russian stooge, a threat to Czech national security, and a reckless populist. It did not work.

In truth, though, the reflex of labeling figures like Babiš as “populists” reveals more about their opponents than about them. In fact, the term “populist” itself has become a convenient rhetorical comfort-blanket for sedentary critics, a means to brandish virtue while avoiding difficult questions about why so many voters are turning away from them. It obscures the actual reasons that prompt voters to turn to parties such as ANO.

The forces long dismissed as “populism” have now migrated from the margins of debate to the machinery of power. To govern, Babiš will need the support of two Right-wing parties: Motorists for Themselves (Motoristé Sobě) and the SPD. Motorists, a newcomer, is a party of reaction. It opposes Europe’s climate policies, favors continued coal use, and despises cycle lanes. It emerged from frustrations with the state and bureaucracy. At the Motorists’ smart post-election reception at Prague’s Martinický Palace, I met Jiří Vlk, a pilot and entrepreneur. He told me that when the country was ravaged by forest fires in 2022, he deployed his fleet of helicopters to rescue people, personally piloting a chopper to save about ten individuals. His reward for this act of gallantry? A fine from the government for not filing the correct forms and obtaining the proper permit before commencing his rescue mission. Founded three years ago, the Motorists won 13 seats in parliament in this election.

The SPD, the other Right-wing party, is anti-migration, anti-EU, and anti-Nato. It wants the Czech Republic to seal itself off from outsiders and devote itself to re-creating an apparently uncontaminated past. Its leader, the Japan-born Tomio Okamura, was severely bullied as a boy. And the SPD, as a Motorists leader put it to me, has become a platform for Okamura to ventilate his inner rage. It performed worse than expected. The trouble for Babiš, who is 21 seats short of a majority, is that he cannot govern without the SPD’s support; at the same time, he does not want to be tainted by association with them. Ultimately, though, what matters most to him is his own survival. Last week, he announced a prospective cabinet featuring the far-Right, which will oversee defense, agriculture and transport.

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Whether Babiš will himself become prime minister is still unclear. He is a defendant in a long-running fraud case over EU farm subsidies, after Prague’s High Court annulled his acquittal by lower court earlier this year; Czech conflict of interest laws may require him to relinquish control of his vast business empire before taking office. Those who know Babiš say he will do everything in his power to both keep his business holdings and become prime minister. But Petr Pavel, a former Nato general who defeated Babiš in the presidential elections of 2023, may yet block him. The prospects of a presidential barrier are diminishing by the day. But if he is prevented from taking office, Babiš will turn to proxies and govern as a puppeteer.

Either way, once ANO assembles a government, its direction will depend upon the extent to which it must depend on two hard-Right partners. If the SPD’s demand for plebiscites on EU and Nato membership, and the Motorists’ agitation against the Green Deal, gain traction, Prague will drift further from Europe. The greater risk, from the perspective of Brussels, is a revived partnership between Babiš, Orbán, and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. Collectively, this triumvirate could form a wrecking coalition. Such a future is far from certain, of course. Czech coalition talks could drag on, and Orbán, the linchpin of this league, will face a credible challenge at next year’s elections in Hungary.

But the very possibility of such an alliance ought to trouble Europe. What is denounced as “populism” is not so much a cogent creed as a verdict on the emptiness of the center. The greater danger for liberal Europe, in other words, is not the strength of these movements: it is the weakness of those who define themselves against them.

Almost four decades after the Velvet Revolution, one of the most dramatic and peaceful transitions from communism to democracy in Europe, Czech politics have settled into the same uneasy pattern seen across much of the continent: volatile, distrustful, and increasingly open to insurgent movements on the Left and Right. Czech democracy has matured and is institutionally robust — the judiciary is independent, and the Czech senate, controlled by Fiala’s coalition, has the powers to block the government’s attempts at overreach — but ordinary citizens measure its success less by its lofty ideals than by the responsiveness of those in power. This is a truth Babiš’s opponents should absorb in opposition.

The reasons for the Nobel Committee’s snub, which occurred at the height of the award’s geopolitical if not literary significance, are not hard to fathom. Most obviously, Kundera was never particularly interested in or engaged by politics. Instead, his work was a passionate defence of the right to pursue one’s own individual desires and lusts against bureaucratic maniacs of whatever stripe who wished to colonise individual experience on behalf of the state. To his critics on both the Right and the Left, Kundera’s stance was borderline immoral, not to mention hopelessly bourgeois. While the Left preferred Che and the Right preferred Solzhenitsyn, Kundera insisted on the human right to be left alone.

As alienating as Cold War ideologues found Kundera’s bourgeois anti-politics, there were also plenty of writers and critics who objected to the qualities of his prose. The intense musicality of his sentences could seem like an artefact of a romantic moment that had passed. His world-class talent for aphorisms could seem similarly dated, a parlour trick that impressed college students on their junior year abroad: “there is no perfection only life” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being); “to laugh is to live profoundly” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). He objectified women, in a way that grew increasingly detached from dominant Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Surely the world had better things to do with its time than to vicariously wallow in the lusts of yet another ageing male writer.

Kundera never saw himself as a political man, as a moralist, a liberal, a conservative, or as an author of texts whose highest destiny was to become movie scripts. He was, quite simply, a novelist. For him, the novel was the highest form of aesthetic endeavour, a kind of anti-scripture representing the sensibility of the individual, containing “an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group”. The faith he placed in the novel as a compass that can be used to negotiate life’s big questions can seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet if you don’t believe that, why bother to write one?

In choosing to write his later books in French, Kundera pulled off the near-miraculous feat of being expressive in a second or third language at a world-class level, putting him in the company of Vladimir Nabokov. The French returned the favour, honouring Kundera, protecting his privacy, and appreciating his uncompromising defence of the individual aesthetic at a point in history when other Western literary cultures had ceased to take novels quite so seriously. “We already had novels with a thesis,” wrote his friend and admirer, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. “We had so-called ‘committed’ novels in which at least one character served as spokesman for the convictions of the author. Kundera’s response was that a conviction is not novelistic, that it cannot shed the awkwardness (or worse, the vulgarity) of concepts rendered in images unless it is immediately relativized, broken, put on hold.”

It is both fitting and also a bit frightening that Kundera’s breakthrough novel, The Joke, published in 1967 in Czech, may be his most accessible — and might have a hard time getting published today in London or New York. The novel tells the story of a Prague university student named Ludvik, whose life is destroyed by a single, ill-timed joke poking fun at the progressive politics of a pretty female classmate who ignored him. When Ludvik returns to school after vacation, he is summoned before the school’s humourless ideological commissars who insist that his words were offensive. When none of his fellow students dares to speak up on his behalf, he is expelled from school.

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Sound familiar? Of course it does. And with decades of communist cancel culture under his belt, Kundera can tell us what happens next. Injured and embittered, Ludvik is exiled from the class of successful young urbanites and spends the subsequent decades of his life nursing a furious grudge against those who wronged him, and plotting his revenge.

Harbouring a special contempt for a state official named Zemanek, who actively pushed for Ludvik’s expulsion from university, he returns to Prague and strikes up an affair with Zemanek’s wife. But their tryst fails to yield the compensation that Ludvik hoped for. Instead, it ends with an affable encounter with Zemanek, who appears to have no recollection of their shared history. Ludvik concludes that holding on to bitterness towards the past is futile, and that he must reconcile himself to the idea that he will never right the wrongs he has suffered.

The idea that the act of forgetting binds together both perpetrators and victims in the common pursuit of survival is at once deeply humanistic and at the same time deeply unsatisfying to moralists who prefer heroes who win out and villains who receive a timely come-uppance. But such endings made little sense to people in places such as Czechoslovakia, for whom learning to live with injustice and defeat was a geographical requirement. Kundera followed The Joke with Life is Elsewhere, a brilliant though largely overlooked satirical novel that posited a different type of forgetting through the story of a poet named Jaromil, who escapes his surroundings by devoting himself to poetry.

The twinned necessities and dangers of memory and forgetting would occupy Kundera for the rest of his life. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1977, was a recognisable masterwork of dissident literature, addressing the forced forgetting of the communist state through seven interlocking stories that brought together historical-political and personal narratives of forgetting in a modernist style with touches of magical realism. What made the book really sing, however, was the combination of these hallmarks of serious world lit with hot, entirely un-Soviet sex scenes, including a long-term ménage à trois and a concluding orgy, which announced the primacy of individual desire over politics in a way that shocked Puritans of both the Right and the Left.

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Kundera deepened his exploration of forgetting to Tolstoyan depths in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Published in 1984 in French and set during the 1968 Prague Spring, a philandering surgeon named Tomas is stuck in a love triangle with his wife, Tereza, a dissident photojournalist, and his favourite mistress, a painter named Sabina. Tereza is heavy; Sabina is light, finding release in sex and in the act of betrayal. Sickened by the tightening political noose, the dangers facing Tereza, and the meaningless of his existence, Tomas escapes with her and their dog Karenin to Zurich. When the homesick Tereza leaves Tomas and returns to Prague with Karenin, Tomas is heartbroken, and follows them back home, where they are blacklisted. Moving to the countryside, Tomas abandons both his work and his womanising, and finds love with Tereza. In a touching scene that prefigures the novel’s end, Karenin develops cancer and dies on the operating table, while smiling at her owners’ attempts to save her life.

What was perhaps most shocking to sophisticated readers after the postmodernist playfulness of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was Kundera’s determination in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to tell a Tolstoyan-existentialist love story without reference to either God or politics. In fact, our lives do have meaning, Kundera insisted, if we choose to make it so. For some, Kundera’s erotic philosophy was compelling. For others, it was a retrograde abandonment of both art and life. Clearly, Kundera himself was compelled by both Tereza and Sabina, which is what gave the novel its force.

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There are readers and critics who acclaimed Kundera’s Nineties novels, beginning with Immortality, ostensibly the conclusion of a trilogy composed of his prior two novels, and Slowness, as masterworks. I am not among them. I find them bloated, pompous and self-indulgent. In some sense, I understand Kundera’s genius to have itself become a victim of history. Once the Eastern Bloc crumbled, the author unavoidably lost touch with the driving necessity of making human sense out of the cruel illogic of totalitarian systems of control, which had been replaced by an everlasting peace made out of bourgeois liberal individualism and oodles of Nutella.

Alas. The paradise that staunched Kundera’s art has proved to be as illusory as the acts of remembering and forgetting can be in his fiction. Luckily, we have Kundera’s masterworks as guides to the new-old world in which the people of the West increasingly find themselves embracing the unfreedoms of the East, in what is surely one of history’s greatest jokes — a joke that Kundera the novelist would have greeted with liberating irony.

It was the great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic. In tone intimate and ironic, it seemed to take its readers into its confidence, assuming a high level of curiosity and scepticism, large-mindedness and mirth, but also anxiety, lest waking from one nightmare was no guarantee that we wouldn’t fall headlong into the next.

We didn’t read it as we read polemic — the characters were too vivid to allow us to forget we were reading fiction — but it was conjecturally high-risk in a way that other novels weren’t. Laughter and Forgetting: the very concatenation of those words promised an original ride. So we hung on, rubbing our eyes as though waking from a long sleep, curious to read whatever Kundera had written earlier and impatient to read whatever he would write next. Today, the laughter has fallen silent and, except among a few aficionados and readers without an axe to grind, Kundera himself is all but forgotten.

The forgetting of Kundera’s title is the state-sponsored forgetting essential to totalitarianism, allowing that totalitarianism insinuates its way into the most private corners of our lives. The novel’s opening reads like a fairy tale told by a historian. “In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace…” Next to Gottwald on the balcony is the Foreign Minister, Vladimir Clementis. It is cold and, noting that Gottwald is bareheaded, Clementis takes the fur hat off his head and puts it on his leader’s. Four years later Clementis is hanged for treason and “immediately airbrushed out of history”, which means being airbrushed out of this and all other photographs as well. Inspect the photograph today and the only evidence that Clementis was ever on that balcony is the fur hat on Gottwald’s head. So tellingly comic is the image that one wants to push it further into surrealism and remove Gottwald too, leaving only the hat to hover Magritte-like in the snow.

We have our own vocabulary to describe what the Czech Communist party did to Clementis 70 years ago. We say it “cancelled” him. It is, I think, instructive to trace cancel culture’s political origins in the mindset of totalitarianism.

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The cruel irony is that Kundera’s novel has itself become the object of the very cancelling it describes. Little by little, whether by malevolent design (which is hard to prove) or by subtle changes in the literary/political zeitgeist (also hard to chart) Kundera and his novels fell out of favour.

He had left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975 and never returned when it was safe to do so. Why was that, some wondered. A willing exile is not the same as a forced one: did he remain in France in order to keep his distance from people who could reveal a secret? Rumours of his having earlier sold out a colleague to the Communist authorities began to circulate. Vehemently denied and never proved though this accusation was, a whiff of deception, not to say betrayal, remained. Not impossibly, some people wanted it to remain in order better to sell or explain a disaffection that had other causes. A Kundera who forged his own biography was a Kundera whose books might also lie to us.

The world was changing; subtle re-evaluations of the contributions of Soviet Communism among those very intellectuals who would once have been Kundera’s admirers, compelled them to think again about him or, as was more convenient, to forget about him altogether. Ideological enemies of the Left were no longer automatically embraced. New sorts of crime, more insidious but not necessarily any less terrible than those which Kundera had made his reputation excoriating, required new and no less vigilant policing. Universities began to take on the aspect of commissariats. You might say that Kundera’s ironic tone, once so bracing, now sounded stale, tactlessly assertive and masculinist. No one was going to ask this question in so many words, but did irony even have a place in literature any longer?

In a marvellous flight of inspirational fancy in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera describes two kinds of laughter: the Devil’s, which denies “all rational meaning to God’s world”, and which by its very maliciousness permits “a greater latitude in living”; and the Angel’s, which is no laughter at all, but a horrible fabrication of it, declaring the beauty and goodness of everything on earth.

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Once a longing for unitary meaning turns into a cult or ideology of that meaning — as Soviet Communism was — any dissenter from that cult becomes its enemy. To cancel, in our culture, is to deny such dissent the space to breath in.

“I too danced in a ring,” Kundera writes. “It was the spring of 1948.” That has the wistful tone of a confession — an allowance that the yearning to join such a dance is inescapable if you are young — albeit the confession of someone who dances in a ring no longer. 1948 was the year of the Communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia. A time of victorious celebration if you were of the Angel’s party, and for that short time, who wasn’t?

You held hands, your hearts overflowing with joy, and danced in a ring of perfect unanimity. It might remind us of the rapturous welcome Jeremy Corbyn was given in Glastonbury by thousands upon thousands of popular music orgiasts, already gathered to dance in a giant ring, and for whom adding Corbyn to their objects of unquestioning worship was a small step. Kundera’s dancers, “fleeing rest and sleep, outstripping time”, finally grow wings and soar above the earthly Prague. The fantasy that buoys them is the same fantasy that briefly enabled Corbyn’s supporters to believe they were flying.

Discussing the surprising omission of Kundera and his long-time admirer Philip Roth from the list of Nobel Prize winners, the French Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut speculates that the charge of misogyny levelled at both writers has something to do with it. “The Stockholm jury was ‘woke’ before the word appeared,” he says. I wish to stay out of using ‘woke’. Words when they come with poisoned tips promote hostility, not accommodation. We all have our sore spots.

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Myself, I bridle at expressions of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, I don’t think even the clearest evidence of it in this or that novelist’s work disqualifies them as novelists. A ferocious, convicted anti-Semite the French writer Céline might have been, but he wrote a couple of fine novels. He made us see the world as we previously had not. Sometimes, in the discomfort we feel reading or looking, is to be found art’s true purpose.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia weakened itself when it airbrushed out Valdimir Clementis but kept his hat. To cancel is to forget, and to forget diminishes not only the forgotten but the forgetter. It is also, as Kundera’s great novel demonstrates, to forgo the liberation there is in laughter — laughter not as the Angels understood it but as the all-disparaging Devil did — the power to question and criticise and scorn, to leave the dance of shared conviction and refuse the ecstatic fantasy of flight.

Today, though, everything is different. October’s election gave the ANO party led by Czech billionaire Andrej Babis (aka the “Czech Donald Trump”)[1.  Babis received that moniker because he, too, is a self-made businessman who jumped into politics at the head of a new movement without any prior political experience. See USA today ] nearly 30 percent of the vote and 78 seats in the 200-seat Czech parliament. Moreover, the third and fourth largest parties in terms of votes and seats are also populist entities that did not even exist ten years ago. Overall, a majority of Czechs voted for parties that represent an array of views but agree on one: the status quo stinks.[2.  The majority comes from the ANO Party (29.64%), the Pirate Party (10.79%), and the anti-immigrant Freedom and Direct Democracy Party (10.64%). VOLBY CZ (in Czech).]

Conventional analysis cannot explain this. The Czech economy, like most economies, dropped after the 2008 financial crisis. But by 2012 it was growing again and from 2015 to election day economic growth surged, hitting 4.7 percent annually by the second quarter of 2017.[3.  For statistics prior to 2016, see OECD. 2017 results can be found at Countryeconomy.com.] Unemployment was also very low, dropping to a mere 2.9 percent by June 2017, the lowest in the EU.[4.  Quartz] Wages were rising well above inflation. Czechs should have been happy and rewarded the Social Democrat-led government with an increased majority.

The fact that they didn’t – instead, the Social Democrats dropped to a mere 7.3 percent, their lowest ever – should give every developed world leader pause. For it shows that populism is not merely about economics: it’s also about culture. You cannot simply feed people’s bellies: you must also feed their souls.

Czech populism did not start in reaction to the 2008 financial crash, as it did in Ireland and many Southern European countries. Nor did it arise as a working-class protest against migration or a stagnant economy as in Scandinavia, France, and the Low Countries. Instead, it arose because of repeated scandals that convinced many Czechs that politicians from the established parties cared more about themselves than the people they purportedly represented.

Public Affairs[5.   Věci veřejné in Czech, which led to the party abbreviation, VV.] was the first Czech populist party to gain parliamentary representation, and it was founded by Radek John, a journalist who investigated public corruption charges.[6.  Czech Radio] Its rise (it won 11% of the vote) was facilitated by a series of scandals involving the Prime Minister, Mirek Topolanek, a year-long controversy over the attempt to schedule a snap election, and the sense that many of Topolanek’s centre-right ODS party had become corrupt in office.[7.  Topolanek’s travails came to prominent notice in the English-speaking world when he was identified in a photo of being nude and in a state of arousal near topless women at Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi’s private pool. The Guardian . He stepped down as the ODS party leader reluctantly shortly before the 2010 election. On the question of the perception of ODS corruption, see Czech Radio (Topolanek’s replacement “one of the few in the current Civic Democrat leadership who has a reputation for being honest and hard-working and not corrupt”). See also The Economist (“the corruption and squabbling of the political class moves Czechs to a sort of languid despair.”)] Public Affairs was centre-right in its policies, however, and quickly joined a three-party government headed by Topolanek’s successor, Petr Necas, and a new centre-right party, TOP 09.[8.  TOP 09 was formed by some politicians who broke away from the centrist Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) and ODS. “TOP” stands for “Tradition, Responsibility, Prosperity” in Czech. See TOP 09 . TOP 09 is the only centre-right party of which this author is aware that says in its statement of principles that “There can never be enough smiling. Not to smile at somebody all day long is a crime.”]

This is of interest because Czechs reacted to the post-crash recession by giving more power to the centre-right even though ODS had led the government when the crash occurred. But the parties within that coalition did not escape censure. ODS dropped from 35 percent to 20 percent and its coalition partners, the Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) and the Greens (SZ) were eliminated from parliament altogether.[9.  VOLBY.CZ] But Czechs also punished the main centre-left party, the Social Democrats (CSSD) even though they had not participated in the government, decreasing their share of the vote from 32 percent to 22 percent.[10.  A new party that split from CSSD in an internal dispute, SPOZ, received 4.33 percent, just missing the five percent threshold for parliamentary representation.] Czechs were clearly more interested in restoring public order than they were in altering their political economy.

They were soon cruelly disappointed. By April 2011, one of the three ministers belong to Public Affairs had been accused of bribery by another Public Affairs deputy. In 2012, that minister, his accuser, and another Public Affairs leader was charged with bribery or corruption. By 2013, Public Affairs had split, with some deputies supporting the government while others joined a new party, Dawn of Direct Democracy, that touted initiative and referendum “as a solution to the corruption, nepotism, clientelism, and kleptocracy”.[11.  Open democracy] As tawdry as all this was, the Czechs hadn’t seen anything yet.

That June, a fresh scandal broke open setting new lows even for the long-suffering country. The very Prime Minister who had a reputation for honesty was embroiled in accusations that he and chief ODS aides had used state security to spy on the PM’s estranged wife whom he was in the process of divorcing.[12.  The Economist] The aides, including Prime Minister Necas’ chief of staff[13.  Necas married his former Chief of Staff within a month after his divorce and only a few months after her arrest. iDNES.CZ], were also charged with bribing recalcitrant lawmakers to make certain key votes. Millions of dollars and over ten kilos of gold were seized by state police. Within a week, the PM resigned; within two months, snap elections had been called.

Those elections show a shift away from the traditional parties, and from the left versus right framework, towards a more populist, ins versus outs approach. ODS plummeted to a mere 7.5 % of the vote and its coalition partner also saw its vote share drop. Despite the turmoil engulfing the centre-right government, the Social Democrats again saw their vote drop. Parties that had a clear place on the left/right continuum received only 73.5% of the vote, down from nearly 94% just seven years earlier. Moreover, a significant portion of that vote was going to parties that did not exist in 2006. The five parties that had garnered 93% in 2006 received a mere 53% in 2013.

The beneficiary of this revolution was the new Association of Dissatisfied Citizens, or ANO to use its Czech acronym.[14.  ANO is also a Czech word that means “yes”. ] Led by the man who now looks likely to become Prime Minister, Andrej Babis, ANO won nearly 19% of the vote, second only to the Social Democrats. Babis focused on ending parliamentary immunity and cleaning up corruption, arguing that only people who stood outside the political system could clean it up. Unlike Public Affairs, it also eschewed any attempt to place it consistently on a left/right pendulum. Supporting both increased social spending on infrastructure and fiscal rectitude, ANO’s platform allowed dissatisfied citizens from all ideologies to say “yes” to change.[15.  ANO continues to openly eschew placement on the left/right pendulum. See the comments of Tatana Mala, ANO candidate in South Moravia, in the 2017 elections. ANO]

The party that split from Public Affairs, Dawn, also entered parliament with about 7% of the vote. Dawn was led and financed by a businessperson, the Japanese-Czech Tomio Okamura. But it was slightly different from ANO in that it argued for stricter immigration policies and a cut in the VAT. These policies distinguished it from the anti-corruption appeals of Public Affairs and ANO, allowing Dawn to make inroads into working-class Czech areas. Dawn’s weakest region was in the city of Prague, which is the richest region in Czechia and a long-time stronghold of the centre-right.[16.  For GDP per capita by Czech region, see Wikipedia] It’s strongest regions were in the poorer regions in Moravia, long strongholds of the Social Democrats and Communists.[17.  See VOLBY.CZ (in Czech; Dawn – Usvit in Czech – received between 8 and 10 percent of the vote in the regions of Olomuc, Zlin, and Moravia-Silesia while getting less than 4 percent in Prague.) By comparison, Public Affairs (VV) and ANO had much more even distributions of their votes among Czechia’s regions. See above for ANO in 2013 and VOLBY.CZ for VV in 2010.]

Babis secured the role of Finance Minister in the ensuing coalition government with the CSSD and the KDU-CSL. In that role, he helped to guide the Czech budget into surplus at the same time the economy began to take off. Thus, it is likely that he and ANO, not the CSSD, received a significant amount of credit for the economic recovery.

The rise of the migration issue throughout Europe also played into increasing public dissatisfaction with established parties. By 2015, Dawn had split into multiple parties, with Okamura leading his acolytes into the Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party. SPD takes a very hostile line toward migration and the EU; it is part of Marine Le Pen’s Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom and received her support during the election.[18.  Youtube. The English translation of its website makes its priorities quite clear: “The End of the EU Dictatorship. Not Islam, Not Terrorists. Support for Those Who Need It. Justice for Every Citizen.” See  SPD (translated by Google Translate).]

But it was Babis who seized the mantle of the new anti-refugee fervor. As the Atlantic’s David Frum notes, conventional centre-left and centre-right parties acceded to German pressure to accept some of the refugees that flocked to Angela Merkel’s opening of German borders in the summer of 2015. Babis, who had never made immigration an issue, resisted and came out against mass migration or refugee settlement.[19.  Frum’s article on the Czech election and its antecedent causes is found at The Atlantic ] But while this probably helped him ride that wave of sentiment, the fact is that ANO had been leading almost every Czech opinion poll since early 2014, trailing in only seven of the over 100 polls taken between the 2013 election and mid-2017.[20.  Wikipedia] Babis and ANO’s broad tent populism had captured the Czech imagination well before refugee policy had become the central issue of European politics.

ANO’s election victory was turned into a landslide, moreover, by exactly the sort of petty infighting and political maneuvering that had given rise to Czech populism to begin with. In May 2017, the Czech PM announced he would resign because of alleged tax avoidance by Babis. He then proceeded to renounce his resignation, fire Babis, take back his action, and then finally sack Babis, replacing him with another member of ANO.[21.  Politico] This followed the sacking of a key figure of the CSSD’s left wing, Jiri Dienstbier, and accompanied a move towards the sort of anti-immigrant policies that Okamura and Babis had long been championing.[22.  Politico]

The result was the astonishing collapse of the Social Democrats. Its working-class base from outside of Prague and its Bohemian environs, referred to as “pork and cabbage voters,” abandoned it in droves in favor of ANO and the SPD. Meanwhile, its professional, middle-class supporters in Prague and Bohemia deserted the party and flocked to the Pirates.[23.  VOLBY.CZ] ODS gained slightly and the KDU-CSL’s share did not change much, but the revolution was complete: the five parties that once won nine in ten votes won slightly more than a third.

The collapse on the left has been nothing short of stunning. In 2010, the four parties that traditionally comprise the left[24.  CSSD (Social Democrats), KCSM (Communists), SPOZ (Social Democrat split), and SZ (Greens).] won 35.7%. In 2013, 44.5%. This year, a mere 16.9%.

Parties of the center and centre-right, meanwhile, barely budged in the past few years. Their initial decline from 42% in 2010 helped to fuel the initial onset of Czech populism, but Czechia’s current populist moment is here solely because of the left’s demise.

It’s tempting to write this off as the simple problems of a small, insignificant country. Tempting, but wrong. Czechia’s move into populism mirrors that of other European countries that have suffered from endemic corruption and political infighting. Italy, for instance, has seen the rise of a broad-tent populist party, Five Star Movement, that seems eerily similar to ANO in its approach to politics and in the charismatic appeal of its non-political leader. Italy also has a party that corresponds to the SPD in the Lega Nord/Up with Salvini, which has transformed itself from a regional party advocating autonomy for Northern Italy into a national party decrying the rise of illegal migration. Just as in Czechia, politics as usual has left the traditional centre-left and centre-right parties with less than majority support in the polls less than a year before that nation’s pivotal elections.

The lesson for political and financial leaders is clear. Voters in these times will not overlook continued self-dealing. They also insist that their concerns be treated with respect, especially those over questions of rapid migration or national identity. Failure to do so will not meet with shrugs and acceptance; they will instead be met with an excited embrace of any outsider who promises to help. If the developed world does not want to reap the whirlwind, it should stop sowing the wind.