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October 20, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
It's not for want of trying that Babis's opponents have been unable to bring his longstanding double-digit poll lead to an end (surveys indicate Ano's favourability rating reached a high of around 32% in the early summer before over the course of around four months falling to its current level of around 25%, still streets ahead of any other party).
October 9 brought news that fraud charges had been pressed against Babis in the Capi hnizdo (Stork Nest) case centred on a €2.3mn EU subsidy obtained a decade ago. Babis protested about his opponents fanning the flames of a “pseudo case” and immediately lodged an appeal, but by October 12 he was facing more difficulties from a decision issued by Slovakia's Constitutional Court. Having considered a request from Slovakia’s Institute of the Nation’s Memory, the court announced that it had ordered a lower court to re-examine claims that Babis had collaborated with the Czechoslovak communist-era secret police as an informer while a foreign trade official in the 1980s.
Having once cleared his name after launching a lawsuit, he now faces the prospect of having to fight another court battle to again obtain a favour- able verdict. That will clearly take time to arrange, thus in the immediate future he will be relying on the impressive Trump-like Teflon qualities he has shown so far to get him past the finishing post. And it would be a brave pundit that bets against him managing to do just that, whatever is thrown up by the October 19 live TV debates between the party leaders.
Corruption disappears as an issue
What then is driving voters? Well if the NFPK An- ticorruption Endowment has it right then it is no longer corruption, which has mostly disappeared as a campaign topic with only the Greens and the Pirates devoting much space to it in their plat- forms, according to the campaign group.
Ano very much fought the last general election
on an anti-corruption ticket and was starting to make quite a noise about it this time around in the
weeks before Babis' Stork Nest woes resulted in a charge. Indeed, in late September political analyst Jiri Pehe was moved by Ano's continuing pledges of an anti-graft revolution to say that Babis might want to explain how he took over Agrofert — which since the 1990s he has built into an agrochemi- cals, foodstuffs and media empire — and became the second-richest person in the country when the Czech “corruption hydra” must have been try- ing repeatedly to drag him under. Almost all au- thoritarian leaders have risen to power with such revolutionary language, Pehe cautioned.
CSSD's manifesto does not mention corruption
at all, even though the party created the cabinet’s anti-corruption council. That's perhaps largely because the conclusion has been drawn all round that picking fights with Brussels is the true vote- swinger. That most popularly applies to immigra- tion, although the alarmist rhetoric often sounds rather odd in the Czech Republic given that the country has hardly accepted a single migrant from the waves that have washed up on southern Europe's shores in the past few years. Not some- thing that cuts much ice with SPD leader Tomio Okamura, the Czech-Japanese-South Korean 'Mr Zero Tolerance' recently shown bare-chested in a party ad lifting weights (and, if reports coming in from democracy activists in the field are correct, boosted by an incredible amount of bill posters across the country, the funding of which those activists would dearly love to scrutinise).
“Now or never” contract
The week saw Babis mail out a “contract with citi- zens” to people’s homes, saying that it is “now or never” for what will be his “first and last attempt” to deliver change. Among the promises in his “contract” are a vow to defend the independent prosecution service and judiciary, regularly raise pensions, not adopt the euro over the next four years and halt illegal migration.
CSSD has made some headway in pushing back on Babis' credibility on migration issues — it ran an ad with a pay stub from a Babis-owned chicken plant detailing a monthly wage of CZK13,000