Why Trouble Is Brewing in the Czech Republic

It has long been a stalwart defender of democracy. But in this election season, the Czech Republic’s growing polarization is bringing illiberal political parties to the fore.

By Krystof Dolezal

September 2025

The Czech Republic is one of the strongest democracies in postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe. It is a firm member of the European Union with a solid economy, and unlike Hungary and Poland, has had few problems with executive aggrandizement. Yet the elections that are to be held on October 3 and 4 to fill all two-hundred seats in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Czech Parliament) could upend that record. Polls suggest that the populist ANO party and its leader Andrej Babiš, who was prime minister from 2017 to 2021, will return to power. This time, however, will be different: Whereas during most of his first turn in the premiership Babiš had depended on the left-centrist Social Democrats to fill out his coalition, this time around he is allying himself with antisystem parties. The reasons are two: the surge of illiberal preelectoral coalitions and the continuing polarization cycle.

The last parliamentary election, which took place in 2021, saw the combined vote totals of social-democratic and antisystem parties sink by a million — a staggering figure in a country of just eleven-million people. Determined to avoid another wipeout and cross the 5 percent threshold to enter Parliament, the illiberal players are making alliances before the 2025 voting. Indeed, this year’s campaign is remarkable when it comes to preelectoral concentration as polls project parliamentary seats for fifteen parties, a level of lower-house fragmentation not seen since the transition elections of 1990 and 1992.

The twist is that the preelectoral-coalition playbook has been a tool that the Czech center-right has used to pursue a cordon sanitaire strategy meant to keep antisystem parties out of government. Indeed, the 2021 elections had been a triumph for this strategy as the center-right Spolu (Together) coalition used it to oust the ANO minority government and its allies, the Communists, so that Spolu could prevent the potential liberal democratic rollback. Now the script has flipped, however, and antisystem coalitions are lining up to see who can cut a deal with ANO and join its coming government. Such a realignment would be unprecedented in the Czech political system, which has never seen antisystem parties make it directly into the executive.

Even as preelectoral maneuvers have filled the illiberal space, polarization has been spiraling. Fueled by the rise of polarizing political actors and the 2012 introduction of direct presidential election, the electorate has split into self-contained but internally volatile “government” and “opposition” blocs. Not even 5 percent of voters will say that they are willing to cross this electoral divide.  With more than a third of the electorate still undecided, the government bloc remains loyal but is not mobilized while the opposition cluster is fired up yet torn between different parties.

Polarization over issues is so sharp, and rival policy agendas have so few areas of overlap, that each camp preaches largely to itself, reinforcing its current members’ demands and anxieties and making zero effort to appeal across the aisle. The existence of two “narrative bubbles,” combined with the scale and intensity of affective polarization, undermines the very notion of a shared political reality.

The government is led by the center-right incumbents of Spolu, who have a strong Christian-democratic element. Spolu casts itself as liberal democracy’s defender, firmly committed to the EU and NATO. Under the consensus-oriented Prime Minister Petr Fiala, the government is set to finish a full term, something the Czech right has not achieved in decades. Fiala’s administration has earned credit for advancing digital transformation, clamping down on conspiratorial media, and managing the Ukrainian refugee crisis (the Czech Republic hosts more refugees per capita than any other EU member state). Yet the government is burdened with one of the lowest approval ratings in the postcommunist era, weighed down by corruption scandals, economic stagnation, and soaring energy and consumer prices.

Spolu is polling at about 20 percent. It was at about that level in September 2021, but rose to 28 percent by the time voting began on October 8, and hung on to win. The secret sauce of that victory was the coalition’s voter-mobilization ability: Turnout that year hit the highest level since 1998. In 2025, as Spolu approaches the campaign’s final stretch, the coalition is seeking to drive its voters to the polls by calling the opposition “evil” and charging that it plans to hijack the country “eastward.”

The appeal for democratic vigilance against ANO’s plausible return to power through alliances with antisystem parties is underlined by developments elsewhere in the region such as Slovakia’s accelerating illiberal reversal under Prime Minister Robert Fico, Poland’s uncertain prospects for redemocratization after the June 2025 presidential election, and the looming uncertainty of the parliamentary elections that Hungary will hold in April 2026.

Unlike in Slovakia and Hungary, where Fico and his counterpart Viktor Orbán invoke “peace” as they repeat Russian narratives, the Czech incumbents have made the war in Ukraine the defining security issue and mobilizational tool. Evoking the Cold War, Spolu casts the conflict as another episode in the long struggle between the democratic West and the autocratic East. In this, the ruling coalition is bolstered by enduring anticommunist sentiment, deeply ingrained anti-Russian feelings, and the threat of autocratization that is gathering in nearby countries.

In contrast, war and security remain weak spots for Spolu’s main adversary, ANO, and Spolu knows it. It pushes back against ANO, which remains fixated on domestic bread-and-butter concerns and now appears adrift after its initial pro-Trump messaging in light of the U.S. administration’s detached approach to Europe.

If Spolu once again succeeds in raising voter turnout, it may well prove able to hold one or two of the opposition parties that are hovering near the 5 percent threshold to totals which end up below that level, thereby causing votes for them to have been “wasted.” Such votes are especially significant because, in the Czech form of party-list proportional representation, they can be reallocated to parties that do clear the threshold. But in trying to keep the fringe parties under the threshold, Spolu is playing with fire: By mobilizing through populist logic, Spolu is validating it and may find it hard to moderate or steer away from. At the same time, its tense tactics are furthering the polarization spiral and undermining the basic consensus on which democracy depends.

If Spolu fails to mobilize, however, the alternative could be worse. If even one of the fringe parties clears the threshold and receives parliamentary seats, the current liberal-democratic government will fall. With the election looming in early October, the governing camp is at roughly 40 percent. Spolu is drawing 20 percent support while the Mayors’ party (who are in the government) and the left-liberal Pirates (who are not in the government but who oppose ANO) are drawing around 10 percent each. If the three cannot push their combined total above 40 percent, they will end up with around eighty seats in the Chamber of Deputies, well short of the 101 needed for a majority.

Democracy Can Also Erode from the Left

Comparativists have argued that the future of liberal democracy in Europe hinges on the center-right’s will and ability to contain the hard right without mainstreaming it. The Czech case is different in that it is the mainstream left, not the right, that has coopted far-right themes. This resembles the situation in Slovakia, where the social-democratic party Smer (Robert Fico’s party) has driven the illiberal turn.

Andrej Babiš’s ANO is the case in point. Built as an oligarchic vehicle for Babiš’s corporate empire, ANO has reshaped Czech politics over the past decade. Marketed at first as a centrist, anticorruption force — the name is both the word “yes” in Czech and a Czech acronym for Action of Dissatisfied Citizens — ANO soon pivoted to seeking social-democratic and communist voters via left-of-center welfare populism and anti-immigration rhetoric. Recently, the party has begun to toy with illiberal and national-conservative appeals in an effort to capture disaffected antisystem voters. Now polling near 30 percent, ANO campaigns against high consumer costs, strains in the healthcare system, and immigration while calling government leaders “criminals.”

The day after the 2025 election will likely find ANO poised to form a government alongside two coalitions: the illiberal leftist Stačilo! (Enough!) and the illiberal rightist SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy) party led by Tomio Okamura. Although antisystem parties have since the 1990s commanded roughly a fifth of the Czech electorate, these parties have remained mostly cut off from holding office. The novelty of the 2025 election is the shifting boundaries of political acceptability, with the shift taking place in a geopolitical climate increasingly conducive to authoritarian and illiberal options.

The key ideological innovation of Stačilo!, Okamura’s SPD, and to some extent ANO, is embracing the rhetoric of “regime change,” a taboo in Czech politics for more than three decades. Their narrative paints the Czech Republic as an unfree and undemocratic outpost of the “collapsing” West, threatened by a “new totalitarianism” and a looming “Romanian scenario” in which an undemocratic elite schemes to defeat the people’s will. These parties campaign for constitutional hardball, promoting the abolition of the Senate (a body that they claim is redundant), demanding that public broadcasters be placed under direct state control, and promoting referendums on Czech withdrawal from the EU and NATO.

The first potential partner of ANO, Stačilo!, is polling at roughly 7 percent. On a single-candidacy list, it unites once-powerful system insiders (the Social Democrats) with outsiders on the extremes: the hard-left Communists plus segments of the ethnonationalist hard right. In this iteration of “left-conservative” politics, Stačilo! positions itself against both mainstream liberalism and the progressive left, blending social and cultural conservatism, national capitalism, and pro-Russian propaganda.

The second potential ally for ANO is SPD. After sliding in support in 2024, the party began to intensify its extremist and even racist rhetoric and succeeded in persuading fringe groups to join its ticket, including the antisystem movement PRO, the nationalist Trikolóra (Tricolor), and the libertarian Svobodní (Free Citizens’ Party). This coalition has lifted SPD to a historic high of 15 percent as its rides resentment of Ukrainian refugees, the covid-19 “totality,” and inclusive educational policies.

The Fallout

In some regions and big cities, Spolu and ANO have formed governing coalitions, but at the national level both the government bloc and its opposition counterpart are categorically ruling out any cooperation. Is there, then, even a remote chance that the two sides can venture out of their respective trenches, find some way to ease polarization, and weaken antisystem forces?

Arguably, this latest episode in the postcommunist history of the Czech Republic will boil down to how the center-right faces the likely electoral winner, ANO. Whether one likes it or not, Babiš’s party is not antisystem, but its oligarchic character, unsavory practices, and readiness to team up with extremists pose a corrosive threat to democracy. If the center-right fails to mobilize voters, it will be left with an impossible choice.

The center-right’s first and likeliest option will be to retreat into opposition. This will leave the country’s future in the hands of ANO and its dubious capacity to contain its extremist partners, who will perhaps alienate some of ANO’s moderate voters. There is a real risk that the country will follow Hungary down the path of democratic backsliding, which is difficult to reverse. The much less probable alternative for the center-right is to strike a deal with ANO, either by propping up a minority government or by entering a grand coalition. This path carries tremendous risks, including electoral disenchantment, intraparty strife, or the grand-coalition trap, in which the mainstream parties find that they have backed themselves into legitimizing and fueling the very extremist forces they set out to contain.

The postelectoral endgame is certain to test Czech democracy’s resilience in terms not only of party politics but of the entire constitutional framework. The resolve that will be demanded of President Petr Pavel will be key: He has hintedthat he will refuse to appoint any antisystem figures to government. A particular “red line” for him is questioning the country’s membership in the EU or NATO.

Will Pavel, a former general and high-ranking NATO official, make good on that hint? Under the Czech constitution, the president appoints the prime minister and then appoints and dismisses cabinet ministers at the prime minister’s “proposal.” No minister is considered sworn in until the president has administered the oath of office.

Czech presidents, especially since they became directly elected, have been active, taking roles in government formation which exceed those of a ceremonial president or a Westminster monarch. Miloš Zeman, the first directly elected president, claimed a significant role in filling cabinet posts. Thus Pavel would not be in wholly uncharted waters: Czech presidents have refused, for various reasons, to appoint people to the cabinet.

Even if President Pavel refuses to swear in antisystem ministers, he will eventually have to accept candidates whom Babiš puts forward. Obviously, Pavel is hoping that his threat will deter Babiš from presenting any antisystem ministers for presidential approval, thereby forestalling a crisis, but will this hope be borne out?

Clearly, the fallout of the Czech election will warrant close attention. The realigning party system and the prospect of a constitutional crisis will yield new evidence to grapple with in the continuing effort to describe a new European political order that is in the making but not yet fully understood. It will also help to complete the picture of the Visegrad countries, once the poster children of the “third wave” and models of democratic globalization, in their current incarnation as the EU’s eastern-flank enfants terribles and a hotbed of illiberal diffusion.

Krystof Dolezal is a postdoctoral fellow at the Central European University in Vienna. He is preparing a monograph on the long-run Christian Democratic legacy in Czechoslovakia and its successor states.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

Featured image credit: Lukas Kabon/Anadolu via Getty Images