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Problems of Post-Communism
ISSN: 1075-8216 (Print) 1557-783X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mppc20
Technocratic Populism and Political Illiberalism in
Central Europe
Vlastimil Havlík
To cite this article: Vlastimil Havlík (2019) Technocratic Populism and Political
Illiberalism in Central Europe, Problems of Post-Communism, 66:6, 369-384, DOI:
10.1080/10758216.2019.1580590
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2019.1580590
Published online: 09 Apr 2019.
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Technocratic Populism and Political Illiberalism
in Central Europe
Vlastimil Havlík
Department of Political Science, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Democratic backsliding, a term commonly used to describe the recent changes in politics in
Central and Eastern Europe, is most profoundly related to the emergence and electoral
success of populist political actors in the region. While the established literature has been
focused almost exclusively on Hungary and Poland, which are the most visible examples of
recent illiberal turns in Central and Eastern Europe driven by national-conservative populists,
the main aim of this paper is to focus on the populism of ANO in the Czech Republic.
Based on a mixed-method content analysis, the main argument of the paper is that the rise of
centrist technocratic populism (perhaps less radical at first glance) ends the era of the Czech
Republic’s exceptionalism in Central Europe in terms of its resistance to populist illiberal
challenges. In other words, the analysis shows that populism combined with technocracy
(and not necessarily with more radical ideologies such as nativism) presents a vision of
a regime alternative to the dominant liberal democratic paradigm. This alternative is based
on a denial of political pluralism, anti-partyism, resistance to constitutionalism, and the
embrace of majoritarianism.
INTRODUCTION
“Democratic backsliding,” a term commonly used to describe
the recent changes in politics in Central and Eastern Europe, is
most profoundly related to the emergence and electoral success
of populist political actors in the region (Krastev 2007;
Rupnik 2007; Dawson and Hanley 2016). To date, scholars
studying problems with the development of democracy in
Central and Eastern Europe have mostly focused on the
cases of Poland and Hungary (Stanley 2015; Enyedi 2016).
The “Fourth Republic” projects pursued by Jarosław
Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party in Poland, and the vision
of illiberal democracy promoted by Viktor Orbán in Hungary,
have raised concerns about the quality of democracy in both
countries. The seriousness of the threat, and the fact that both
Kaczyński and Orbán have already had the opportunity to
implement their visions and reforms of the political system,
help to explain why interest in recent developments in the
Czech Republic has remained overshadowed by concerns
about its Hungarian and Polish neighbors.
There is another very good reason for this oversight. The
Czech Republic has always been considered as a frontrunner
of democratic transition and consolidation in post-communist
Europe. Unlike Slovakia during the era of Mečiarism, the
Czech Republic did not experience years of a hybrid regime
in the 1990s (Hloušek and Kopeček 2003). Nor did it experience
a populist coalition as Poland did in the 2000s (Jasiewicz
2008; Stanley 2015) or an illiberal shift such as Orbán put into
practice in Hungary in the early 2010s (Pappas 2014). Rather,
it maintained a stable polity, firmly rooted in liberal democracy,
and was especially notable for the emergence and stability
of its party democracy. Czech party politics more closely
resembled the established party systems of Western Europe
than the highly volatile party environments in other Central
and Eastern European countries (Bértoa 2014; Powell and
Tucker 2014).
Nevertheless, repeated corruption scandals, government
instability, and the economic crisis created an opportunity
for the emergence of new populist challengers in the Czech
Republic. The populist surge culminated with the unprecedented
electoral successes of the political party known as
ANO 2011 (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens 2011; ano is the
Address correspondence to Vlastimil Havlík, Department of Political
Science, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Joštova 10, Brno,
Czech Republic. E-mail: havlik@fss.muni.cz.
Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 66, no. 6, 2019, 369–384
Copyright © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1075-8216 (print)/1557-783X (online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2019.1580590
word for “yes” in Czech), which became the most successful
new political party since the fall of communism (winning
18.7 percent of votes in the 2013 general election and
a victory with 29.6 percent in the last general election in
October 2017). Although ANO is ideologically unfocused
and, at first glance, not as radical in its discourse as the
governing parties in Poland and Hungary, this paper aims to
show that the technocratic or managerial populism of ANO
reflects the contemporary illiberal tendencies in Central and
Eastern Europe. The main underlying argument of the paper is
that the recent surge of populism and consequent political
illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe is in no way limited
to nativist conservative (or far-right) populist discourses as in
the cases of Poland and Hungary. I argue that the technocratic
variant of “centrist” populism (Pop-Eleches 2010) poses
a threat to the foundations of liberal democracy that is much
like that posed by the more radical versions of populism. I also
discuss the reasons behind the rise of ANO and compare it to
similar cases in other Central and East European countries.
I will demonstrate that anti-political technocratic discourse
has become a common feature of Central and East European
party systems and is not an exception stemming from the
specific conditions of the Czech Republic, making this species
of populism an important subject for future comparative
research.
POPULISM AND DEMOCRACY
Let me start with a definition of populism. With the thousands
of pages that have been written to define the “slippery concept”
of populism, a consensus on the core elements of populism has
emerged. To put it simply, populism can be best understood
with reference to three fundamental and tightly connected
characteristics: (1) a perception of the people and the elites as
homogeneous groups (people-centrism); (2) construction of an
antagonistic and essentially moralistic (Manichean) divide
between the two groups; and (3) a view of the people as
a moral sovereign and the need to restore the allegedly stolen
sovereignty of the people (see Mudde 2004; Albertazzi and
McDonnell 2008; Stanley 2008; Hawkins 2009; Rooduijn
2013). This perception is perhaps best summed up in Cas
Mudde’s “minimal” definition of populism:
a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately
separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups,
“the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” and which argues
that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale
(general will) of the people. (Mudde 2004, 562)
The majority of the authors agree that populism does not
represent an antithesis of democracy as such (Mény and
Surel 2002; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012).
However, the relationship between populism and democracy
is complex, and the key here is a specification of
democracy. More than twenty-five years have passed
since the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s famous book
about the end of history—basically, the victory of political
liberalism (Fukuyama 2006). Although the book did not
garner unanimous acclaim, there were relatively few doubts
about the prevailing “liberal democratic consensus” both in
the Western world and in emerging democracies of Central
and Eastern Europe. Therefore, for an understanding of the
position of populism in relation to democracy, the adjective
“liberal” is the key here.
It is not an easy task to define liberal democracy.
Nevertheless, it is possible to find a basic agreement on
the features that make a liberal democracy a distinctive type
of political regime. Following John Rawls’s approach to
political liberalism, Takis S. Pappas stresses the idea of the
existence of political pluralism, that is, contestation of
concurrent but largely incompatible ideological doctrines
(Pappas 2014). Even more than the objective existence of
ideological competition, the acknowledgment thereof
makes one a liberal democrat. If we use the terminology
of comparative party-politics research, political pluralism
translates into multiple cleavages dividing society into
groups defined by different and mostly contradictory interests
based on their socio-demography (class, religion, geography)
or political attitudes. These interests are
articulated, aggregated, and represented by political parties
competing on the electoral market.
Nevertheless, despite the diversity of largely inconsistent
ideologies, liberal democracy is based on an overlapping
consensus. This means that there is a common ground
on which the society and/or political actors can agree and,
more importantly, they seek to find a consensus and prefer
moderation and deliberation based on constitutionalism.
Constitutionalism includes a set of institutional guarantees
and principles against the unbalanced power of the people,
with the aim of limiting the concentration of power and
protecting minority rights. In this sense, liberal democracy
stems from majority rule but, at the same time, embraces
institutions that guard against the possible tyranny of the
majority at the expense of minorities (Pappas 2014).
By contrast, the populist vision of democracy stems
from what Margaret Canovan describes as two faces of
democracy. The redemptive face refers to a vision that
promises “salvation through politics” and a return to popular
power, with the people as the only legitimate authority,
and to the direct exercise of power without institutional
constraints. The pragmatic face refers to a peaceful resolution
of conflicts in society (as an alternative to violence or
even civil war), and to preserving the government, institutions,
and rules (Canovan 1999). Similarly, Chantal Mouffe
distinguishes between two pillars of democracy: a liberal
370 HAVLÍK
(or constitutional) one that focuses on individual rights and
the rule of law, and a democratic one that emphasizes
participation and popular sovereignty (Mouffe 2000; see
also Abts and Rummens 2007).
In the eyes of populists, democracy is a one-sided phenomenon:
it refers only to the power of the people (Mény and
Surel 2002); populists “have little patience with liberalism’s
emphasis on procedural niceties and protections for individual
rights” (Plattner 2010, 88). For Pappas, illiberalism is the key
defining feature of populism (Pappas 2014). To put it simply,
populism is a threat to contemporary democracies not because
it is fundamentally undemocratic but because it is illiberal.
Populism is democratic only in a majoritarian sense (Plattner
2010); it contravenes the principles of constitutional and/or
liberal democracy (Abts and Rummens 2007).
Since populism is based on the principle of homogeneity of
the people, when populists adhere to a redemptive form of
democracy, there is an underlying presumption that the will
of the people is unified and there is a universal idea of good that
is expressed by the people and is recognized and pursued by the
populist leader (Stanley 2008; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser
2012; Pappas 2014). Consequently, there is very little space for
political pluralism. Instead, the populist perception of politics
relies on one single divide: the moral conflict between the good
people and the bad elite. As stated by Peter Mair:
Populist democracy […] assumes no fundamental clash of
interests between different sectors of the electorate: voters
are citizens first, and only later, if at all, are they workers,
employers, farmers, women, immigrants, or whatever. […]
It [the government] serves as an administrator, seeking the
best solutions available on the basis of objective criteria.
(Mair 2002, 520)
In a similar fashion, Daniele Caramani draws a contrast
between populism and party democracy that also applies to
political pluralism. In the populist view,
there are things that are either good or bad for the whole of
society and political action can be either good or bad for
society in its entirety. There is a homogenous and organic
vision of the people and the nation. It is furthermore possible
to “discover” this common or general interest.
(Caramani 2017, 60)
The stress on the proclaimed existence of the universal good
also stems from the emphasis that populist narratives often
place on common-sense or other seemingly “apolitical” solutions,
which is more clearly evident in the case of less ideologically
embedded populist parties (Canovan 1981; Pauwels
2010). As the empirical part of this article shows, the apolitical
technocratic populist narrative of ANO can well serve as
a basis for illiberal anti-pluralism.
The morality of the conflict (Hawkins 2009) also means
that populism, unlike other forms of democratic politics,
is far more adversarial and has little need for compromise.
In turn, there is a paradox in the essence of populism. On
the one hand, it presumes the existence of a recognizable
(and implicitly consensual) universal good, and on the
other hand, it claims for itself the ability to identify and
defend the good (monopoly on truth). There is something
exclusive in the relationship between the people and the
populist actor. The other political actors are not perceived
as competing rivals. Their presence is at most tolerated but
more often denigrated. More importantly, this denigration
is not based on policy disagreements but is outright rejection.
The problem is not what policy is but who proposes
it. Therefore, there is no space for policy debates, or for
compromise, since the other actors are not considered as
legitimate rivals: they are the enemies of the people. I will
demonstrate below that technocratic populism as represented
by ANO can contribute to the construction of this
highly adversarial and essentially hierarchical conflict
between apolitical or anti-party technocratic rule and the
world of fundamentally political or ideological conflicts
embodied in political parties and party politicians.
Last, but not least, majoritarian rule, which disregards
(because it does not recognize) minority interests and the
need for the protection thereof, is applied. This point is
closely related to the first one. Populism equates the general
interest or the common good with the will of the people,
which means the will of the majority of voters. In turn, the
majority is equated to society as a whole. Consequently, it
leaves only a little space for the protection of minorities,
separation of powers, checks-and-balances, and other forms
of constitutional constraints (Pappas 2014; see also Plattner
2010 and Caramani 2017; see Table 1). In this kind of
technocratic populism, as represented by ANO, the stress
on majoritarianism and the need to establish a majoritarian
polity is framed in terms of effectiveness and competency.
Although the illiberal nature of populism stems from its
general features, its specific content varies depending on the
“species” of populism or the host ideology to which populism is
attached. Populist ideology rarely stands alone (it has an “empty
heart”—Taggart 2000). In other words, how the people are
portrayed, who is presented as the enemy, and what the solution
is for the political malaise differ in time and place. As Ben
Stanley states, the “thin nature [of populist ideology] means that
it […] lacks the capacity to put forward a wide-ranging and
coherent programme for the solution to crucial political quesTABLE
1
Elements of Liberal and Populist Democracy
Liberal democracy Populist democracy
Plurality of interests Universal good
Overlapping consensus Adversarial politics
Constitutionalism Majoritarianism
Source: Based on Pappas 2014, updated by the author.
TECHNOCRATIC POPULISM AND POLITICAL ILLIBERALISM 371
tions” (Stanley 2008, 95). Consequently, the illiberal populist
narrative is partly dependent on the content of the host ideology.
While the exclusionist nativism of the populist radical right
elicits disrespect for the rights of ethnic or religious minorities,
the populist radical left is more focused on economic questions
and the “capitalist enemy,” and is more prone to violate ownership
rights. Therefore, to fully understand the illiberal nature
and consequences of a populist actor, it is necessary to focus
both on the type of populist appeal (its host ideology) and the
specific illiberal discourse, its reasoning, proposals, and implemented
policies. In turn, the empirical section of the paper will
combine two interrelated perspectives. First, I will analyze the
populist discourse of ANO using the three interrelated elements
of populism described above: the people, the anti-elite appeal,
and restoration of the sovereignty of the people. Second, I will
focus on the illiberalism of ANO using the three elements
introduced above: the existence of the universal good, adversarial
politics, and majoritarianism. However, it would not be
possible or useful to separate the two concepts. I also provide
a brief introduction to the history of ANO.
METHODS AND DATA
Qualitative Analysis
I use both qualitative and quantitative approaches here. As
for the qualitative part of the analysis, different sources of
data were used with “purposive sampling” as a data selection
technique. As stated by Satu Elo and coauthors, “purposive
sampling is suitable for qualitative studies where the
researcher is interested in informants who have the best
knowledge concerning the research topic” (Elo et al. 2014).
In other words, I chose data that are expected to be valuable
sources of positions and policy platforms of ANO, such as
election manifestoes presented before the general elections
in 2013 and 2017. In addition to the election manifestoes,
Andrej Babiš’s blog (https://andrejBabiš.blog.idnes.cz/)
was included as well as all interviews with representatives
of ANO presented on the party’s website (www.anobudelip.
cz). Other sources used to create as accurate a picture of
ANO’s discourse as possible were Andrej Babiš’s 2017
book What I Dream About When I Happen to Be Sleeping
and the founding ANO 2011 Declaration (ANO 2011),
published in November 2011. The full list of sources incorporated
in the data corpus is available from the author upon
request.
The method of analysis can be best described as
a qualitative content analysis (Schreier 2012; Elo et al.
2014). More precisely, I opted for a combination of “directed
content analysis” and “summative content analysis.”
Directed content analysis is typified by a more structured
process than a conventional inductive qualitative content
analysis. This approach is based on a priori knowledge of
the core concepts and/or categories (in this case, elements
of both populism and illiberalism). The summative content
analysis uses a latent content approach that is aimed at
discovering the underlying meaning of the content.
I proceeded as follows. After the collection of the data,
based on the directed content analysis approach I identified
content (it could be a sentence, a number of sentences, or
a paragraph) that referred to elements of populism and/or
illiberalism. The summative part of the content analysis
was based on the following set of questions: How does
ANO talk about the people? What are the characteristics of
the people attached to them by the political parties? Who is
the enemy of the people? What are the characteristics of the
enemy? What is the relationship of the enemy to the people?
What is the solution provided by the party? How
should the people’s sovereignty be restored? What is the
attitude of ANO toward political pluralism? What is its
relationship to deliberation and compromise? What kind
of polity and settings of decision making does it prefer?
Furthermore, I identified and systematized the main
meanings of the elements of the concepts and reconstructed
the nature of the populism (and more general platforms)
and illiberalism of ANO. I listed the meanings of the
people, the nature of the enemy and the labels attached to
it, including its (alleged) characteristics in the specific
context of the statements analyzed, the problems stemming
from the behavior of the enemy, and also solutions provided
by the party. In sum, the analysis combined both
a deductive (the existence of predefined concepts) and an
inductive approach (expressed in finding the specific characteristics
of the predefined concepts). The analysis is not
strictly structured by elements of populism or illiberalism,
since—as the theory expects and as it turned out—the
populism and illiberalism of the party are intertwined.
Quantitative Analysis
In addition, a quantitative approach that draws from two
different kinds of data was employed. First, Chapel Hill
Expert survey data from 2014 (Bakker et al. 2014) were
employed to plot the positions of parliamentary political parties
in political space. Political space was defined by the two
dimensions generally considered to be most important to
capture politics in Europe in general and in the Czech
Republic in particular. Two scales were used: the economic
left–right scale defined mainly by the role of the state in the
economy; and the scale defined by green politics, alternative
politics, and libertarianism on the one hand and by traditionalism,
authoritarianism and nationalism on the other hand
(GAL/TAN) (see, for example, Hloušek and Kopeček 2008;
Chytilek and Eibl 2011). The left–right economic divide is
operationalized using the 11-point lrecon variable; the GAL/
TAN divide is operationalized using the 11-point galtan variable.
The 2014 dataset also offers two new measures of
salience pertinent to my analysis: antielite_sal, an 11-point
372 HAVLÍK
measure of the salience of anti-elite sentiment in party
appeals, and corrupt_sal, an 11-point measure of the salience
of corruption in party appeals. The basic unit of analysis is
a mean expert coder judgment per party.
Last but not least, original data from the Campaign
Dynamics project were used to present the nature of the
appeal of ANO. The data draw from quantitative manual
coding of statements of representatives of political parties
during the month before the general elections in 2010 and
2013 (only the data from 2013 are relevant for this work;
unfortunately, the data for the 2017 election have not been
gathered yet). Each country team selected two daily newspapers
(in the case of the Czech Republic, the right-leaning
Mladá fronta and left-leaning Právo). Newspaper articles
related to national elections from four weeks prior to the
election day were collected and analyzed by each country
team, composed of a country expert and three graduate
research assistants as coders. All front-page articles were
coded as well as a 5 percent random sample of the rest of
the election-related articles until at least 60 articles per
newspaper/election had been coded. Three different types
of statements were coded: policy statements, valence statements,
and issue-related valence statements. Policy statements
released by a political party referred to its positions
in pre-defined policy areas (such as taxation, social policy,
or immigration). Valence statements referred to specific
qualities of a political party including its honesty, integrity,
competence, performance, or internal unity. The last type of
statement is a combination of the two previous ones; that is,
it refers to valence characteristics of a political party within
a specific issue area. Coding was checked for inter-coder
reliability (see detailed information about coding in
Baumann and Gross 2016 and the full dataset at Debus
et al. 2018). Based on the lack of a host ideology and its
suggested replacement by competence as a defining feature
of centrist populism (at least in the Czech case), I present
an overview of the importance of different kinds of statements
for the parliamentary parties to capture the nature of
appeal of the parties. In particular, I compare the share of
policy and valence issues, because the prevalence of
valence statements and a lack of (clear) policy statement
should be typical for populist parties such as ANO.
HISTORY AND ELECTORAL SUCCESS OF ANO IN
A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
In November 2011, Andrej Babiš, a billionaire of Slovak
origin and the owner of the biggest agro-chemical company
in the Czech Republic, released a declaration titled
“Action of Dissatisfied Citizens” (Akce nespokojených
občanů; hence the initials ANO). He criticized the existing
situation in Czech politics and Czech politicians,
calling on citizens to take part in an initiative for “a
more just society, and a functional state with the rule of
law” (ANO 2011). Babiš was not an unknown name in
Czech politics and business. Before 1989, he graduated
from the University of Economics in Prague and was sent
to Morocco as a representative of Petrimex, a statecontrolled
international trading company. After 1989, he
became the managing director of Agrofert, a company that
focused on agricultural and fertilizer production. Babiš
managed to develop Agrofert into one of the largest companies
in the Czech Republic, in the face of rumors
suggesting that he had taken over the company illegally.
He can hardly be seen as an outsider (as he has consistently
claimed), for he allegedly had very good relationships
with top Czech politicians and his business profited
from privatization and state agricultural subsidies (Kaiser
2013; Pergler 2014).
Eventually, the ANO initiative became the basis for the
ANO party, which was registered by the Ministry of
Interior on May 11, 2012. ANO took part in the 2012
Senate elections, but none of the candidates supported by
ANO made it into the second round of voting (a two-round
runoff electoral system is used). This election disaster
turned out to be one of the most important drivers of
ANO’s later success. The party (or, more precisely, its
leader Andrej Babiš and his companies) decided to invest
extensively into political marketing: the party logo was
changed (Jankajová 2013) and it became a fully professional
electoral party (Paleček 2015, for the concept see
Panebianco 1988 or Lees-Marshment 2001), employing
one of the country’s best experts on political marketing.
Furthermore, Agrofert bought two of the country’s most
important dailies (including their digital versions), two
weeklies, and a radio station just before or shortly after
the 2013 election. Consequently, ANO rolled out a very
intensive election campaign before the 2013 early election.
It finished with 18.65 percent of the vote and 47 out of 200
seats and became the most successful genuinely new political
party in the Czech Republic since the first free election
after the fall of communism.
ANO 2011 eventually became a part of the new government
alongside the Social Democrats (ČSSD) and the
Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL). Unlike other populist
parties in government, ANO decided not to abandon its
populist narrative (it only slightly changed its content and
put more emphasis on presenting the results of its ministerial
work), nor did it embrace a clearer ideological profile.
After very good results in local, regional, and European
elections (ANO won the latter two by a small margin),
ANO won the 2017 general election with 29.6 percent
of the vote and 74 seats out of 200 in the lower chamber
of the parliament. After the single-party minority government
led by Babiš lost a vote of confidence, a cabinet of
TECHNOCRATIC POPULISM AND POLITICAL ILLIBERALISM 373
ANO and ČSSD supported by the Communist Party was
formed.
Although the institutional context is often considered
one of the most important factors determining the rise of
new political parties (Willey 1998; Tavits 2006; Hino
2012), the setting of the political system cannot be solely
accountable for the electoral breakthrough of ANO, for
neither the party law, nor the electoral system, nor public
funding of political parties underwent significant changes
before the 2013 or 2017 general election (see, for example,
Havlík and Haughton 2017).
The electoral success of ANO, much like that of the
Public Affairs party in 2010 (Havlík and Hloušek 2014),
can be best understood as a result of the deepened crisis of
political trust in political parties, and party democracy in
general, that was exacerbated by the economic difficulties
of the country. Between the second half of 2008 and the
electoral campaign of 2013, the Czech Republic experienced
decline and stagnation of GDP growth, relatively
high unemployment, and growing public debt. Moreover,
more than two-thirds of the population perceived the economic
situation as bad shortly before the 2013 election,
which was twice the level in June 2008 (Červenka 2013)
The enduring economic crisis was accompanied by
a decline in political trust fed by government crises
(Hloušek and Kopeček 2014; Brunclík 2016), repeated
corruption scandals, and the systemic symbiosis between
political parties on the one hand and “well-connected”
private businesses on the other, which was increasingly
reported in the media (Klíma 2013; Kupka and Mocht’ak
2015). As shown in the national election studies, declared
attachment to political parties decreased from 56 percent to
31 percent of the public in 2013 (CVVM 2002, 2013);
while only 23 percent of voters made up their minds during
the last weeks before the 2006 election, this number
increased to more than 40 percent in 2013. The increased
availability of voters on the electoral market rose in the
context of high disapproval of party democracy and the
performance of political parties.
The level of public anti-partyism became critical shortly
before the 2013 election, with less than 50 percent of people
agreeing with the statement that political parties are necessary
for democracy, and only 25 percent believing in 2012 that
becoming a member of a political party can change anything.
The feeling that there are no differences between political
parties was shared by 75 percent of people (a historic high),
while 87 percent thought that political parties were corrupt
(Čadová 2013).
Widespread dissatisfaction with political parties and party
democracy went hand in hand with rising disrespect toward
politicians; just a couple of months before the general election,
being a member of parliament (MP) became the least prestigious
occupation (MPs scored only 25 points on a 0–99 scale,
15 points less than in 2004; Tuček 2013).
As will be shown, the populist-technocratic anti-party discourse
of ANO and Babiš fitted perfectly in the atmosphere of
declining political trust, critical evaluation of political parties,
and negative attitudes toward politicians and politics in general,
and was reflected in the electoral base of ANO. Neither ideology
nor policy attitudes nor a specific social class predicted
support for ANO, unlike for the established parties. Instead,
positive assessment of competency to deal with the most
important policy issues increased the chances of voting for
ANO in 2013 (Maškarinec 2017; Havlík and Voda 2018). As
the data from the 2017 Czech National Election Study show,
the socio-demographics and policy preferences of ANO’s
voters are still not very clear (although ANO was supported
more by older voters). Rather, the best predictor was the country’s
economic position: even after several years of economic
recovery, ANO was perceived as competent to resolve economic
issues (Czech National Election Study 2017).
Rather than being a unique case, the emergence of ANO
should be approached in the context of a broader wave of
recently successful Central and East European political
parties using anti-political, anti-party narratives. In
Slovenia, these include Positive Slovenia, the Citizen List
of Gregor Virant, the Party of Miro Cerar, and the List of
Marjan Šarec; in Slovakia, the Party of Ordinary Citizens
and Independent Personalities, and We are the Family—
Boris Kollár; and in Lithuania, the Labor Party and the
National Resurrection Party. To some extent, a forerunner
of ANO in the Czech Republic, Public Affairs, could be
added to the list as well.
All these parties share several commonalities. Their leaders
proclaimed themselves to be outsiders with non-political
backgrounds. Zoran Jankovič (Positive Slovenia), Igor
Matovič (Ordinary Citizens), Boris Kollár (Boris Kollár—
We are the Family), Viktor Uspaskich (Labor Party), and
Arūnas Valinskas (National Resurrection Party) were successful
businessmen before their entry into politics; Gregor Virant
and Miro Cerar were university professors; Marjan Šarec
became well-known for his career as a professional comedian
and political satirist; and the leader of Public Affairs, Radek
John, was a former investigative journalist. In all cases, the
curricula vitae of the party leaders were skillfully employed in
broader anti-establishment, anti-ideological, or even antipolitical
narratives. Moreover, all of these parties avoided
using traditional labels to describe their political direction
and presented themselves as standing above outdated ideological
conflicts (see Havlík and Hloušek 2014; Aleknonis and
Matkevičienė 2016; Krašovec 2017; Marušiak 2017).
The conditions that preceded the emergence of these new
populist parties strongly resemble the context for the rise of
ANO. Corruption scandals, government crises, economic difficulties,
and a subsequent erosion of trust in political parties
and party democracy created fertile ground for the emergence
of this type of political entrepreneurs. Despite the fact that not
all Central and East European countries have experienced
374 HAVLÍK
a rise of technocratic non-political populism (detailed comparative
research of the reasons for this goes beyond the scope
of this article), the cases of ANO and other political parties in
the region show that, if the context is favorable enough, the
resentment against the governing elites is not necessarily
transformed into support for the established opposition parties
or for ideologically extreme variants of populism. In a context
of low trust in political parties and party democracy, voting for
a populist with a non-political background seems to be
a viable alternative.
TECHNOCRATIC POPULISM AND POLITICAL
ILLIBERALISM OF ANO
Figure 1 shows the positions of political parties in the political
space defined by two elements related to the nature of populism:
salience of anti-elitism and salience of anti-corruption
appeals. The figure shows a very clear distinction between the
two populist parties (ANO, and the radical-right Dawn) that
exhibit high salience of anti-corruption and high salience of
anti-elitism, and the rest of the political parties with
a moderate level of salience of corruption (referring to the
quite high general importance of the issue in the Czech context)
and a low level of anti-elitism. The exception here is the
radical-left Communist Party (KSČM), which shows
a moderate level of anti-elitism. In other words, the data
clearly show the importance of anti-elitism and anticorruption
rhetoric for the profile of ANO; that is, they show
the highly present issues defining populist discourse. The
question remains, what is the nature of ANO’s populism?
Not surprisingly, the core of the party’s populist appeal
was the construction of the divide between the people and
the political elite. Unlike populist radical-right parties,
ANO did not define the people strictly in terms of
a nation, ethnic group, or religion. Nor did it adopt the
class approach usually employed by the radical left.
Instead, ANO’s people-centrism used the traditional notion
of “Czech golden hands,” which refers to an alleged high
level of craftsmanship and the popularity of a do-it-yourself
approach in the Czech Republic (Hradecká 2013). This
glorification of the Czech people did not stand alone, but
was a part of the key element of any populist discourse—
the proclaimed division between the people and the politicians.
It was clearly expressed in one of ANO’s main
slogans before the 2013 general election: “We are
a talented nation, but we are governed by the inept.” This
notion was later elaborated by Babiš in his 2017 book:
Bohemians, Moravians, and Silesians are an extremely inventive
and creative nation. Although our country is not as big as
Germany, Italy, or Poland, we are a great nation because of
our talent to learn things and to be inventive. Even fifty years
of suppression of freedom and creativity was not able to
knock out the heritage of Baťa [the famous entrepreneur in
the shoe business in interwar Czechoslovakia]; we have the
talent in our genes. Inventiveness, creativity, and extraordinary
skills. And the Czech resilience. The power to get up
again. (Babiš 2017)
FIGURE 1 Position of political parties in political space (anti-elitism salience and corruption salience). Data source: Bakker et al. 2014. The position
refers to mean expert coder judgments per party. antielite_salience: the salience of anti-elite sentiment in party appeals where 0 = not important at all, 10 =
extremely important.; corrupt_salience: salience of corruption in party appeals where 0 = not important at all, 10 = extremely important.
TECHNOCRATIC POPULISM AND POLITICAL ILLIBERALISM 375
Notably, the populist heartland (Taggart 2000) constructed
by ANO, the almost mythical notion of the
Czechs, was not defined in ethnic, racial, religious, or
class terms. Instead, it depicted a land of ordinary people
who are exceptional for their diligence, extraordinary manual
skills, brightness, and wit. Importantly, the party
refused to portray itself as an advocate of the interests of
a narrow part of society. It claimed that it is a political party
for everyone, effectively crosscutting all of the existing
political cleavages and replacing them with a new and
supposedly dominant populist divide, and more or less
explicitly denying the existence of political pluralism.
The “other side” of the divide was defined by a very
strong anti-establishment appeal. Its main feature was
a general denigration of the established political parties
regardless of their ideology. ANO employed the terms
“traditional political parties” and later, partly as a reaction
to criticism of the party’s undemocratic nature, “so-called
democratic parties,” thus resembling the discourse used by
the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia before and during
communist rule. These terms referred to all the older political
parties,1
and were used to construct an image of the
existence of a homogeneous political class (Schedler 1996).
The corruption, incompetency, inexperience, and low morals
of politicians were presented by Babiš as the main
reasons behind the malaise in Czech politics and also as
the main reason why Babiš decided to establish his political
party:
My name is Andrej Babiš. I employ thousands of people in my
companies in the Czech Republic, I pay hundreds of millions of
crowns in taxes, and I’m angry, just like you. I’m angry because
since the [Velvet] revolution [in November 1989], politicians of
our country not only have failed to lead, but they have watched
over the embezzlement of the country. I’m angry that we live in
a dysfunctional state. (ANO 2011)
The main problems of the Czech Republic are incompetent
and unprofessional politicians and primarily the rulebreaking
that is the result of this incompetence of our socalled
elites. (Babiš 2013a)
The anti-establishment appeal of ANO 2011 was built
upon a set of negative characterizations of the current political
elites and the alleged consequences they had for the state of
affairs in the Czech Republic. The image of the elites constructed
by ANO was quite simple: the elites (representatives
of the established parties) were seen as corrupt, powerseeking,
pursuing their own (business) interests in politics,
and generally incompetent to take decisions shaping citizen’s
everyday lives and running the state.
Politicians do not work to make things better for everybody,
but for their hunger for power and the interests of the
influential groups that placed them in office and at the top
of their candidate lists. (Babiš 2013b)
What is important is that the movement’s anti-establishment
appeal did not focus on one or more specific parties but
against practically every relevant political party, which it
blamed for the bad situation in the Czech Republic and
characterized as a homogeneous entity, often labeled simply
as “politicians,” “parliamentary political parties,” or “traditional
political parties.” Consequently, it would be false to
understand ANO as a regular opposition party aiming its
criticism at the government, or as just a part of the political
spectrum (the “left” or the “right”). The “enemy” is defined
more broadly and in language that goes beyond the standard
categories of government–opposition dynamics.
The fierce criticism of the established political parties
served as a basis for a more general mixture of anti-political
and anti-party sentiment. It consisted of two important interrelated
elements: a moral dichotomy between (partisan) politics
and the sphere of “hard work” embodied both by Babiš
himself and by the ordinary Czech people (see above), and
challenging the ideological perception of political conflicts.
The negative picture of politics was not seemingly presented
as skepticism about politics as such, but rather about how
politics is conducted by political elites who have transformed
it into a corrupt system: “traditional parties [the pejorative
word partaje was used in the original] privatized politics for
themselves and their pals” (Babiš 2017, 6). The core of the
solution proposed by Babiš was not fundamentally political
but rather a mixture of anti-politics and anti-partyism built on
the implementation of business practices strictly based on
competence and expertise instead of ideology, party affiliation,
or the deliberative competition of political parties.
Eventually, this led to the construction of the two contrasting
environments: the dirty world of party democracy and the
effective, allegedly morally cleaner, world of business, the
world Babiš comes from.
I was not spoiled by politics, I jumped straight into it with my
colleagues, and we did not have time for looking around. It
was a completely different world for me. The world full of
hypocrisy, animosity, lies, and manipulation. A promise or
a handshake did not mean anything, one thing is said in
private and something completely different in front of the
cameras. For a man from business, it was difficult to imagine
something like that. […] Instead, I met completely incompetent
people, or on the contrary all-powerful people, buckpassers,
and scammers. (Babiš 2017, 7–8)
An important element of this part of the discourse was
the portrayal of representatives of the established political
parties as career politicians without experience from
“ordinary life,” as (probably intentionally using Weber’s
typology) people living from politics. The description of
former prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka as a man “who
has not been able to build a dog house [although an
376 HAVLÍK
ordinary Czech man can do it]” illustrates nicely both the
anti-political narrative of ANO and the divide between the
ordinary people and politicians. When talking about “politicians
who have never worked, who only know parties’
secretariats” (Babiš 2013d), Babiš did not refer to
a particular party, nor to the established parties in general.
Instead, politicians are seen through a set of negative characteristics,
as almost a specific, useless, human species, and
consequently politics is seen as a realm full of scams,
corruption, and incompetency. One representative of ANO
did admit that there are “decent people” in the political
parties; however, they are the exception in the generally
rotten world of politics and political parties.
An important part of ANO’s populist anti-political
narrative was de-ideologization, or even depoliticization,
and its resistance to being presented in terms of traditional
party families or a left–right ideological orientation.
Although the party initially leaned to the right (Babiš
himself admitted that he had voted for the center-right
Civic Democratic Party [ODS] in the past), it soon
decided to sidestep a clear ideological profile and sought
to target all groups of voters with a non-ideological appeal
(Paleček 2015). Both the objective and the subjective lack
of a clear host ideology could be identified.
Using the data from the 2014 Chapel Hill expert survey,
Figure 2 depicts the positions of political parties in the
political space defined by the economic left–right dimension
and by the GAL/TAN dimension. The most important
finding is related to the centrist position of ANO. Although
it was located slightly to the right on the economic left–
right dimension, it significantly differed from the rest of the
parliamentary parties. All the other parties can be characterized
quite clearly (the distance from the center is at least
+2 on a 10-point scale) either regarding their attitudes
toward the economy or regarding their position on the
socio-culturally defined GAL/TAN dimension.
This objective ideological emptiness can also be illustrated
by the high proportion of valence issues (as opposed
to positional issues) in ANO 2011’s election platform
before the 2013 general election. The share of valence
issues exceeded all other parties’ space in their respective
platforms (Eibl 2014). Table 2 shows shares of different
types of statements for each political party before the 2013
FIGURE 2 Position of political parties in political space (lrecon and galtan). Data source: Bakker et al. 2014. The position refers to mean expert coder
judgments per party. lrecon: the economic left-right scale defined mainly by the role of the state in the economy where left = 0; right = 10; galtan: the scale
defined by green politics, alternative politics and libertarianism (GAL) on the one hand and traditionalism, authoritarianism and nationalism (TAN) on the
other hand where GAL = 0; TAN = 10.
TABLE 2
Type of Statements Made by Political Parties (2010–2013)
Party Issue Issue - valence Valence N
ČSSD 67.80% 9.60% 22.60% 208
ODS 54.40% 4.40% 41.10% 90
KSČM 78.60% 5.70% 15.70% 70
KDU-ČSL 75.80% 6.50% 17.70% 62
TOP 09 63.90% 15.50% 20.60% 97
ANO 2011 50.80% 8.30% 40.80% 120
Dawn 57.10% 14.30% 28.60% 28
Total 63.90% 9.00% 27.10% 675
Data source: Comparative Campaign Dynamics Project (2016), N =
1154. Party acronyms: ČSSD–Česká strana sociálně demokratická; ODS–
Občanská demokratická strana, KSČM = Komunistická strana Čech
a Moravy; KDU–ČSL–Křesťanská a demokratická unie–Československá
strana lidová; Dawn=Úsvit přímé demokracie Tomia Okamury.
TECHNOCRATIC POPULISM AND POLITICAL ILLIBERALISM 377
election, using the data from Comparative Campaign
Dynamics Project. On average, approximately two-thirds
of all statements were related to a position of a political
party on a political issue, while slightly more than onequarter
of the statements referred to a valence characteristic
of a party. The rest of the statements contained valence
statements linked to a political issue. However, the share of
issue statements made by ANO is well below the average,
with only one-half of the statements introducing a party
policy position. On the contrary, two-fifths of the statements
were about the valence characteristics of ANO.
ODS is the only other political party to have an overall
profile of the statements made in one year being similar to
ANO’s. This can be explained by the change of in party
leadership after the corruption scandal of Prime Minister
Petr Nečas shortly before the 2013 general election. The
party tried to persuade voters that the new leadership represented
a new, “better” ODS.
ANO was intentionally ideologically vague and this is
shown in its objectively measurable lack of a clear left–
right ideological leaning. The categories traditionally used
to describe (party) politics (right or left ideologies, for
example) were presented as part of the world of the “traditional
political parties” that needed to be replaced by
a completely new approach embodied in Babiš and his
party. This populist division was presented as by far the
most important conflict within the society, making other
political and societal divides irrelevant.
It was not so long ago when all politicians and political
scientists freaked out when we said that ANO is neither
a clear rightist, nor leftist subject. I would always state that
the so-called left and so-called right strung us along before the
elections, but they make deals with each other in the end. […]
I might repeat myself, but it is really neither left nor right,
what is going on in the Czech politics. What is going on in
politics now is that the established parties want to remain in
office. There is no such thing as right and left. In the Czech
Republic, we have a completely different division. On one
side are the current parties and current politicians, and on the
other side are the voters, that is, we, who can cast our ballots
for one of the current parties […]. Now, it is time for voters to
say which of the parties from the “other side” is as close as
possible to them. Or they can choose a movement that is not
on the “other side,” and it never will be. (Babiš 2013e)
ANO tried to emphasize the alleged convergence between
the established political parties, thus strengthening the already
mentioned notion of the political class and adding another
dimension. This new dimension, as part of its antiestablishment
appeal, stressed the harmfulness of ideological
politics and explicitly denied the relevance of ideologically
different policy proposals. According to ANO, the differences
are pretend; the only conflict that matters is the divide
between the corrupt political class and the non-ideological
or non-political solution proposed by Babiš and his party.
The division between the left and the right has not mattered
for a long time; any ideology has evaporated from the
traditional ossified political parties over the years. There
are still some people who have been prospering from political
loot for more than twenty years. Although they use
different slogans, they are united in their sole aim: To
remain in politics, and if this is not possible then to find
another way to milk the state. They know very well that
they could not have such a good living in normal life. If
any. They live from politics. Functions and money from it,
this is their ideology. (Babiš 2017)
At first glance, the established political parties are being
held to account for the failure of the standard ideological
politics, but Babiš and his party have not offered a revival of
ideological politics but rather a completely different solution.
Based on Paul Lucardie’s terminology (Lucardie 2000), the
party is not a “purifier” (like the Union of Freedom in 1998 or
TOP 09 in 2010; Hanley 2012) but a “project of newness” that
has been built around a different set of claims that are intended
to sound non-political and non-ideological; that is, different
from the way politics as such (not a specific rightist or leftist
political program) has been approached by the established
political parties. The claimed otherness of ANO was also
underlined by the fact that ANO was registered as a political
movement, not a political party, because, as stated by one of
Babiš’s marketing advisors, “people hate new political parties”
(Jankajová 2013). The statement emphasizing that ANO
is not a political party but a movement has become a recurrent
theme in the narrative of the party. For instance, Babiš claimed
that he had founded ANO 2011 as a “Civic Forum for the
Future” (Česká televize 2013). He referred to the broad movement
that emerged at the time communism fell and that was
also based on a strong anti-partyism best expressed in the
well-known slogan “Political parties are for partisans, the
Civic Forum is for everyone” (the expressions “political
party” or “partisanship” had strong negative associations
with the ruling Communist Party and the prominent position
of members and cadres of the Communist Party in the
society). Nevertheless, in reality, the organization of ANO
2011 can be best characterized as a business-firm political
party. The real operation of the party has been extremely
leader-dependent and autocratic, not growing out of the grassroot
activities that are generally considered to be the essence
of movement-type organizations (Kopeček 2016).
In other words, denial of political pluralism was present at
two levels: in the definition of the people and in the presentation
of political rivals and political competition. ANO’s main narrative
was not about a conflict of competing “goods” on the
left–right ideological spectrum. Instead, according to ANO,
there is only one universal good—to listen to and serve the
people.
What solution did ANO propose? The very basis of the
host ideology of ANO’s populism was a contrast between
(positive) practices typical for running companies and
a supposedly dysfunctional, spendthrift, and corruption-
378 HAVLÍK
ridden state run by the current set of politicians, along with
the presented life story of the self-made, successful businessman,
Andrej Babiš. The pre-election slogan from 2013
(“We’re not like the politicians—we work!”) clearly illustrates
the first element, the dichotomy constructed in the
ANO 2011 discourse between the “incompetent” politicians
of the established parties that were detached from and/or
unsuccessful in “real life,” and the ANO 2011 representatives’
(particularly Babiš’s) experience in running big companies,
employing people, and paying taxes:
After twenty years of experience with governance by our
political parties, I do not much trust the flowery claims.
What I believe in […] is that a state can be run like a private
company, not like a chaotic juggernaut [Moloch], where the
godfather’s right-hand does not know what the left one is
doing. (Babiš 2013c)
None of the current parties, none of the politicians who stated
that they would solve the most burning problems facing the
Czech Republic have been successful. We’re voting for the
same people who, because of their interests, only make promises
and lie […]. Isn’t it about time that someone goes into
Czech politics whom you can trust? Isn’t it time that people
enter politics who have some experience behind them and
know what real work looks like? Isn’t it time that we all have
it a little better?” (Babiš 2013b)
Indeed, an important part of the populist narrative of the
party was the story of Andrej Babiš as a hard-working selfmade
businessman who “had started his business from
scratch and who had been working from morning till evening
and who was sleeping in an office at Vaclav Square [in
the center of Prague]” (Babiš 2017, 8). Creating an efficient,
private-sector-style approach as the main solution for
politics and public administration was reflected in the slogan
“I will run the state like a business,” which ANO took
into the election campaign, and was later changed to “run
the state like a family business” (Babiš 2017). Effectiveness
has been a recurring theme in ANO’s discourse. As an
alternative to the politics of intrigue and pointless conflict
(see above), ANO promised to “run the state simply, effectively—using
common sense.” The party promised to make
tax collection as well as public spending and state bureaucracy
more effective. The slogans “Things will be better
off” (which became a part of the logo before the 2013
election campaign) and “[we will run the state more effectively]
so that our children want to live here” (Paleček
2015) illustrate the emphasis put on the proclaimed competence
of the party. They also show that the discourse of
the party was not solely based on negative campaigning
against the established political parties.
On the contrary, there was a positive message of the party’s
populist narrative, based on promises related to better governance
guaranteed by Babiš and his party fellows with
experience from private business. Yet, this technocratic managerial
approach was combined with populism. Babiš’s
alleged managerial skills would be applied to listening carefully
to the people and their common sense. Almost daily
meetings with people on the streets (or at least an effort to
create this image using social networks such as Facebook),
and, before the regional election in 2016, the creation of the
project “We Want a Better Czechia” (Chceme lepší Česko)
a website where people were asked to tell Babiš “what they
dream about and what they are afraid of” (www.chcemelepsi
cesko.cz), constructed the image of the party leader as someone
whose decisions are based on the will of the people.
Babiš’s managerial approach, concentrated around the
notion of effectiveness, included proposals for how to reform
different elements of the Czech constitutional system. Instead
of the ideologically framed changes that have been advanced
by Kaczyński in Poland or Orbán in Hungary, ANO’s (mostly
Babiš’s) proposals were directed toward supposedly simpler
and faster decision-making. The already mentioned contrast
between the worlds of business and politics was used again,
this time stressing the effectiveness of the former and slowness
of the latter. According to ANO, this slowness stems
from both the institutional settings of the Czech political
system and from pointless and ultimately unnecessary discussions.
As for the first, the ideal situation for Babiš would be
the existence of one-party majority governments with very
few restraints on the implementation of cabinet policies, for
“first of all, coalition quarrels complicate everything” (Babiš
2017, 125). As Babiš said in one interview, he “appreciate[s]
the majoritarian system in the USA. When Trump came to
power, he went into the office at once and made a decision. He
did not have coalition meetings, commissions, councils”
(Perknerová 2017). Or on another occasion, “There are a lot
of things we can learn in Slovakia, unfortunately. It may be the
case because there was the single party government of Robert
Fico. It decided on something, called the parliament; they
made the law; there was drive” (Kašpárek 2017).
The existence of political conflicts and deliberation is
contrasted with a managerial style of efficiency; at the same
time, the managerial narrative leads to a strong preference for
the executive branch of power over the legislative one. As
Babiš once said, the parliament is a “blatherhouse”
(žvanírna), and so he would not join the opposition if he lost
an election: I will not sit in the blatherhouse where people like
Kalousek [the chairman of right-center TOP 09] pretend
democracy” (IDnes.cz 2016). The picture of an ineffective
lower chamber (where MPs talked, but did not work) became
the main rationale behind ANO’s proposal to limit the time for
parliamentary discussion according to the size of parliamentary
factions (Perknerová 2017). It would again restrict the
parliamentary control of the government.
ANO used the argument of supposedly best practices from
other countries (regardless of the context of the respective
political systems) when formulating how to change the Czech
TECHNOCRATIC POPULISM AND POLITICAL ILLIBERALISM 379
political system. The proposed reforms (as expressed in different
interviews, election manifestoes, and Babiš’s book)
include lowering the number of MPs in the lower chamber
to 101 (instead of 200); introducing a first-past-the-post electoral
system for elections to both chambers of the parliament;
eventually abolishing the Senate (the upper parliamentary
chamber); limiting parliamentary discussion; reducing the
number of ministries; introducing referenda; abolishing regional
administration; directly electing mayors; possibly abolishing
local councils; and also strengthening the influence of the
state on the public media.
In a similar vein, Babiš criticized2
the existence of the
Senate (the upper parliamentary chamber) because “it hinders
the legislation process” (Kašpárek 2017). In practice,
although the Senate has only limited powers in the ordinary
legislative process (its legislative veto can be overridden by
a majority vote of the lower chamber), and the government
is not responsible to the Senate, it has important competencies
when it comes to voting on constitutional law,
election law, impeachment of the president, or appointment
of judges of the Constitutional Court. Nevertheless, Babiš
has repeatedly downplayed the role of the Senate, pointing
to low electoral turnouts and suggesting, in a populist way,
to delegate its powers to the people or to the president
(because of his legitimacy stemming from direct election).
What about the Senate? It is claimed to be a safeguard of
democracy. I think that voters have repeatedly given their
answer comprehensively. […] there is no interest in Senate
elections. […] Voters do not want the Senate. Abolishment
of the Senate would not be a wild experiment. (Babiš 2017,
131)
Of course, the Senate has some powers, too, for instance how
to prevent anarchy [bezvladi] or violent constitutional
changes. So these powers should be delegated to the president
when he is elected directly. The most important changes, the
constitutional changes or international treaties, should be
decided in referenda by everyone. (Babiš 2017, 131)
The narrative of a centralized management that would
increase the efficiency of the state is also reflected in
ANO’s vision of the sub-state level of governance. First,
there was the proposal to abolish the regional level of
administration, which was depicted as a set of institutions
that was corrupt and too expensive. The current powers of
the regions would be moved to the state and to bigger
municipalities. The second step was that mayors would be
elected directly, and they would be endowed with stronger
competencies “supported by the service of the effective
state” (Babiš 2017, 128). So the state would have more
powers to influence decision making on the local level, and
consequently, the vertical division of power would be
weakened. Moreover, it is not clear whether the local
councils would remain. If not, the level of centralization
and concentration of power would be even higher; if so, the
new system would generate competing centers of power on
the local level, similar, for instance, to the situation at the
regional level in Slovakia or the eventually unsuccessful
experiment with direct election of the prime minister in
Israel in the 1990s.
Although each proposal taken separately might sound reasonable
to many, when all of them are taken together, the
result is a specific, highly centralized, strongly majoritarian
version of a democratic polity with little regard for either
horizontal or vertical separations of power, and a weakened
system of checks and balances, including the media. In the
event that the current proportional representation electoral
system for the lower parliamentary chamber remained in
place (introduction of first-past-the-post was not a part of the
election manifesto for the 2017 general election), the lower
number of MPs and consequently smaller electoral districts
and the d’Hondt divisor would significantly strengthen the
disproportionality of the electoral results, thus favoring the
position of the winner of the election.
Similarly, first-past-the-post favors the strongest political
party and, indeed, can help to gain a legislative majority. The
existence of single-party majority governments is not problematic
per se; the problem is the main framing that ANO used to
justify it, namely the stress on effectiveness and speed of
decision-making instead of deliberation. Following the constructed,
anti-political divide between the “people who have
done something in ordinary life” and “politicians who do not
work,” Babiš also proposed limiting to three the number of
successive electoral terms an MP could be elected to (the populist
Five Star Movement in Italy made a similar claim in its
election manifesto). Similarly, weakening and eventual abolition
of the Senate and the local councils would lead to
a significant increase in centralized power and would strengthen
the majority position in the lower parliamentary chamber.
CONCLUSION
This article aimed to analyze the discourse of the political
party ANO to examine the nature of its populism and the
illiberal consequences thereof. ANO can hardly be
described using standard labels based on traditional party
families or ideologies. Moreover, the data showed high
salience of anti-corruption and anti-elitism as the defining
feature of ANO. The data from the Comparative Campaign
Dynamics Project indicate that the lack of a coherent host
ideology made way for an emphasis on valence characteristics.
To put it differently, instead of ideology, parties such
as ANO try to “sell” their qualities related to leadership or
competence. All the same, these characteristics make ANO
380 HAVLÍK
different from the established political parties. The most
important discursive characteristic of the party was its
populism characterized by fierce criticism of the established
political parties based on the alleged corrupt behavior
of party representatives. Corruption was presented as
a major problem in politics in the Czech Republic.
Moreover, the accusations expressed by ANO were not
selective but instead targeted all parliamentary political
parties. Another alleged characteristic of the political elites
was their incompetence. Being a (career) politician was
seen as something disqualifying, having been contrasted
with both the virtú of the Czech people, depicted as
a talented nation, and with a party leader experienced in
managing successful private companies (ANO 2011).
The key element of the populist discourse was the constructed
contrast between “standard” politics and business
practices, with a preference for the latter. ANO combined
populism with anti-party and anti-political discourse that
suppressed what may be called standard ideological politics.
The divide between the technocratic populism of ANO
and politics as it is conducted by the established political
parties is moral in its essence: it describes the former as
a clear good and the latter as essentially bad. Therefore, the
first one should be preferred and the second one strongly
rejected, with no place for compromise. In other words, the
political debate—as seen by ANO—shifted from
a substantive one that focused on the differences between
proposed policies (in terms of standard cleavages) to one
that focused on how politics is conducted.
The populism of ANO has, similarly to other populisms
elsewhere, its consequences for the perception of democracy.
The construction of both the people and the political
establishment as homogeneous groups puts into doubt the
idea of political pluralism as an essential element of politics.
Indeed, ANO rejected policy-based differences (the
differences between the left and the right) as irrelevant
and claimed the dominance of the populist divide.
Conflicts between the left and the right do not matter.
What matters is a proper representation of the people as
the universal good. According to ANO, the good is not only
recognizable but also achievable through the idea of technocratic
or expert governance guaranteed by a non-party,
non-political, competent administration. It cannot be put
into practice by career politicians. According to ANO,
good governance by career politicians, who are curtailed
by the party apparatus, ideology, and senseless bickering, is
an oxymoron. What people need, ANO claimed, is an
experienced manager who can run the state effectively.
According to ANO, its leader, Andrej Babiš, a successful
businessman, was a guarantee of proper administration of
the state. This is not to say that ANO’s discourse lacks
policy statements, but that valence statements dominated
over issue statements and, consequently, undermined the
idea of the pluralistic, deliberative political environment.
The stress placed on technocratic, supposedly effective
governance, denying the existence of political pluralism,
was translated into a preference for a strongly majoritarian
vision of democracy undisturbed by political quarrels and
unhindered by an extensive system of checks and balances
or separation of powers. This vision incorporates strengthening
the position of the executive, and weakening the legislature
in terms of its important control function within both the
horizontal and the vertical separations of power. According to
ANO, the best system is a system with a single-party majority
government with only minor functional constraints. In other
words, although based on a different type of reasoning (antipolitical,
anti-party technocratic populism), the discourse of
the currently most popular political party in the Czech
Republic fits into the pattern of the recent backsliding of
liberal democracies in Central and Eastern Europe that has
been happening in Poland and Hungary.
Unlike Hungary and Poland, however, it is on the discursive
level, for now. ANO was not able to secure a majority in
the last general election, nor has it yet been able to form
a majority coalition government. All the same, the Czech
constitutional system is typified by a more complex set of
checks and balances, and therefore it seems to be more resilient
to constitutional changes. There is also a more liberal
part of ANO (represented, for example, by the minister of
justice, Robert Pelikán), which means that a systematic effort
to change the regime would probably be challenged by internal
opposition in the party. Nevertheless, that fact is that
ANO, a party with an illiberal political platform, won the
election, while political parties sticking to principles of liberal
democracy lost most of their electoral support. Second, principles
of liberal democracy can be weakened without implementation
of constitutional reforms, sometimes even without
passing ordinary laws, by using executive orders (moreover,
there is an illiberal majority in the parliament including the
communists and the radical right). As for internal opposition,
it would not be the first time that members of the party have
opposed ANO politics; in all cases, however, the opposition
would be forced to leave the party or would voluntarily leave
the party or distance themselves from it (as was the case with
European Parliament members Pavel Telička and Petr Ježek).
Moreover, there is a lot of literature showing the power of
elite framing and cueing—that is, the fact that the public is
socialized and eventually tends to adopt stances presented by
political elites (Hooghe 2007; Chong and Druckman 2007).
This means that the presence of an illiberal discourse may
delegitimize the practice of liberal democracy in the eyes of
the public. Although it has not yet tried to change the character
of the regime, the recent electoral success of ANO shows that
the Czech Republic has not been spared from the emergence
and governance of illiberal populist actors.
The unprecedented success of ANO also contributes to the
literature on the decline of political parties (Daalder 1992;
Dalton and Weldon 2005). As has been shown, anti-partyism,
TECHNOCRATIC POPULISM AND POLITICAL ILLIBERALISM 381
not limited to rejecting established political parties but also
targeting practices typical for modern representative politics,
wasanimportantpartofANO’stechnocratic populist discourse.
And even more importantly, ANO combined two positions
dangerous to party democracy: a populist acknowledgment of
the universal common good of the people and the technocratic
ability to recognize the best solution based on the demands of
the citizens. Although seemingly incompatible, ANO was able
to merge these two approaches and reflected the widespread
dissatisfaction with politics as represented by (the established)
political parties. Indeed, the party offered up a story of an
outsider with the ability to restore popular sovereignty by
listening to the people, mingling with them almost on a daily
basis, and at the same time providing the necessary expertise
stemming from business experience. Although not very common,
this discursive formula is not unique. Former Italian prime
minister Silvio Berlusconi (Bickerton and Accetti 2014) and
Raffael Correa in Ecuador (De la Torre 2014) have shown that
technocratic populism can be highly successful. The recent
developments of party politics in other Central and Eastern
European countries show that this kind of populism is by no
means a rare but instead a quite common expression of dissatisfaction
with political parties and party democracy in the
region. It also shows that the rise of this kind of populism is
not just a sign of normal political dissatisfaction; it is part of the
decline and transformation of party politics as such.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For comments on early versions of the article I am particularly
grateful to Ivan Jarabinský and Andrew Roberts. The article
has also profited very substantially from the suggestions of the
anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal.
FUNDING
This article was elaborated in the framework of the grant
project Radicalization of Politics in Central Europe in
Times of Crises (GA17-09296S) sponsored by the Grant
Agency of the Czech Republic.
NOTES
1. Quite interestingly, when it comes to aiming at individual parties,
both the Communists and the far-right Dawn (later Freedom and
Direct Democracy, or SPD) were far less targeted by ANO. To
some extent, this is logical, given the fact that neither the
Communists nor the SPD have participated in the government and
both parties share an anti-establishment or anti-system approach.
Nevertheless, a more precise examination is needed.
2. During the 2016 Senate election campaign, however, Babiš claimed
that the Senate is an important democratic institution.
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