The second round of the Czech senate elections, held over the weekend of 27-28th September, ended in the victory of ex-PM Andrej Babiš’s right-wing populist ANO (‘YES’, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), which secured a total number of votes surpassing—when tallied individually—that of every governing and opposition party.
These results are part of a growing, Europe-wide pattern of significant electoral gains for national conservative parties, which crumbling coalitions of the Left and center then seek to ignore.
This comes just a week after the regional parliamentary elections—held alongside the first round of voting or the upper house—in which ANO came out on top in ten out of the country’s 13 regions in a landslide, pushing the disastrous coalition government to the verge of collapse after one of its members was virtually eliminated, losing 96 seats out of its 99.
Together, the five-party government coalition still controls the majority in the Czech senate, but it’s becoming increasingly likely that they’ll lose the lower house during next year’s general elections—if their formation can survive until then.
Over the two rounds, the country was re-electing one-third of its 81-member senate for six-year mandates, as it does every two years. ANO took eight out of the 27 available seats (an eightfold increase since the last election), while PM Petr Fiala’s center-right ODS is down from ten to five, finishing in third place.
The governing coalition did end up with 15 seats out of the 27, but that’s hardly impressive given that it shares these seats between five parties. The ODS-led three-member Spolu alliance has nine seats, its coalition partner Mayors and Independents (STAN) has another six, while the Pirate Party finished with zero.
Three more parties managed to get one seat each, including the social democrat SOCDEM, the Greens-offshoot SEN21, as well as Babiš’s right-wing ally in the Patriots for Europe (PfE) group in Brussels, the newcomer Přísaha, which was founded in 2021 by a former police investigator on a specifically anti-corruption platform that became famous for its criticism of the government’s pandemic measures.
The general trend in the Czech Republic is the same as in most European countries: voters reject mainstream politics and turn toward the populist Right. With three election victories behind him within less than half a year, Babiš’s road toward reclaiming the government next year seems pretty straightforward.
