The pro-Russian bloc in Europe’s heartland is set to continue growing in 2025. Central European leaders sympathetic to the Kremlin, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico, could be joined next year by another face well-known, former Czech Prime Minister and billionaire Andrej Babiš, who is again increasing in opinion polls.
As a kind of political ‘chameleon’, Babiš is less ideologically oriented than Orban or Fico, but he nevertheless turned his party sharply to the right and echoes the rhetoric of his colleagues in Hungary and Slovakia. Like Orban, Babiš also believes that the Russian war in Ukraine would not have happened if the US president had been Donald Trump, and believes that the Republican candidate’s election victory in November would ensure peace. Also, like Slovak populist Prime Minister Robert Fico, the Czech tycoon has previously signaled a tendency to reduce support for Ukraine.
Senior Czech officials have sought to discredit Babis, a controversial agricultural tycoon who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021, as Orbán’s go-to man since his Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) party joined the far-right Patriots , the Hungarian leader’s anti-immigration party this summer. “The ANO movement is just Orbán’s puppet,” Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky told Politico. “They have obviously found friends among pro-Russian nationalists and xenophobes” in the European Parliament, he added. The former prime minister and his opposition ANO achieved a convincing victory in September.
