• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Czech polls close as PM Babis seeks to cling to power

October 9, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

October 9, 2021

By Jason Hovet and Robert Muller

PRAGUE (Reuters) -Czechs wrapped up voting in a tight election on Saturday in which Prime Minister Andrej Babis battled criticism that he mismanaged the pandemic, stoked fast-rising debt with handouts and tended to his own business interests in office.

The billionaire, who denies all the accusations, and his populist ANO party took a slight poll lead going into the central European country’s vote.

Seeking a second term, he says the country needed stability and was prospering better than before.

Voting ended at 2 p.m. (1200 GMT) and results will start to come through later on Saturday.

Babis vowed in his campaign to continue raising public sector wages and pensions, hoping to shore up the basis of his popular support. He also stepped up his anti-migrant rhetoric and pledged to prevent ceding powers to the European Union.

But he faced a strong challenge from the centre-right Together coalition and the progressive Pirates/Mayors bloc that refuse to work with Babis over what they say are his unacceptable conflicts of interest related to the business empire he created before entering politics.

ANO was unlikely to secure a majority but looked certain to win more votes than any single party, giving the premier the first shot at forming the next government.

His party may struggle to find partners, with two parties that backed the outgoing minority government at risk of losing their lower house seats. That could force ANO to seek an alliance with the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy Party.

Babis’s big-spending policies, maintained despite a broad recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, mark a break from traditional Czech fiscal prudence. Debt is set to be among the fastest growing in the bloc, albeit from a low base.

Some voters said they were voting against this populism.

“I will vote for Spolu (Together) because I want a change,” said Jan Mrazek, a 39-year-old manager, before casting his vote in a northern Prague district.

“I don’t like how the government has been running, the disorganisation during the pandemic and how they are piling up debt because they are just populists throwing money around.”

BATTLING BRUSSELS

The opposition has blamed Babis for chaotic policy changes during the peak of pandemic. More than 30,000 people have died from the virus, one of Europe’s worst per-capita death tolls.

Conflict of interest allegations, however, have been Babis’s main headache since entering government as a junior member in 2013 and after winning a 2017 election.

The 67-year-old, fifth on Forbes’ list of richest Czechs, put his Agrofert conglomerate of food, agriculture, chemical and media companies in trust funds in 2017 and has denied wrongdoing, saying he met legal obligations. But a European Commission audit determined there was a conflict of interest and it has stopped development grants to Agrofert.

New allegations surfaced last weekend that Babis used opaque offshore structures to buy real estate in France before entering politics. He denied the allegations contained in the “Pandora Papers” documenting hidden offshore finance, saying they are part of a campaign against him.

Babis has accused the Pirate/Mayors coalition of selling out the country by supporting more European integration and eventual adoption of the euro.

He has also criticised Together’s leading party, the Civic Democrats, for failed policies when they led the country a decade ago.

(Reporting by Jason Hovet, Robert Muller and Jan Lopatka; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Mike Harrison)

Source Link Czech polls close as PM Babis seeks to cling to power

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Venice prepares to charge tourists, require booking
  2. Poland condemns jailing of Belarus protest leaders
  3. Verizon sweetens subsidies on iPhones to match competition
  4. SquadPal is a social app to help remote working teams gel

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version