The Toxic Politics of Migration in the Czech Republic

I met the future prime minister of the Czech Republic early in 2014, at a Washington, D.C. breakfast organized by the “No Labels” movement. Andrej Babis had recently been appointed his nation’s finance minister. He and the No Labels organizers had met at a conference in Europe and been mutually fascinated by each other’s promises of trans-ideological problem-solving.

I wasn’t as impressed. Babis looked to me less like a problem solver, more like an example of the problem to be solved. Babis had become very rich, very fast, in a very murky way. A hereditary member of the pre-1989 communist elite, in the post-communist scramble he had gained managerial control of very valuable state assets, including the great preponderance of the country’s agricultural land. Through complex financial transactions, he soon emerged as those assets’ outright owner—and reputedly his country’s richest or second-richest man. At every step of the way, Babis was dogged by accusations of financial fraud and past collaboration with the communist-era secret police—accusations he dismisses as the work of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.

The self-promotion of the former communist elite into a new post-communist ownership elite ranked high among populist grievances everywhere in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Babis responded to these resentments with his own distinctive approach almost all the Czech Republic’s media—one of its largest radio stations, its two most influential daily newspapers, and its most popular news website, among other properties.