Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO) has stated that he will not resign, and will remain in parliament even if his party ends up in opposition. Credit: Andrej Babiš via Facebook.
Czech Rep., Oct 11 (BD) – In a video posted on social media on Sunday, outgoing Prime Minister Babiš – a billionaire at the center of numerous scandals – said he will not step down. Last week he declared that he would resign from the chamber if his party ended up in opposition.
In the video Babiš acknowledges defeat: “There were five parties all against us and they had only one program: to remove Babis,” he said.
Voting took place on Friday and Saturday to elect the lower house of Parliament, but the elections were far closer than opinion polling suggested, and did not go as hoped by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and his close ally, President Miloš Zeman, currently being treated in intensive care.
The two opposition alliances, Spolu (a center-right pro-European coalition, composed of three parties) and Pirates and Mayors (a center-left liberal coalition) between them took more than half the seats in the lower house (108 of 200), and have signed a memorandum stating their willingness to govern together to exclude Babiš from the government.
57-year-old Petr Fiala, a former professor of political science and rector of Masaryk University, will likely be in charge of forming the new government, even though Zeman has previously said that he would give the job to the biggest party in the Chamber, and not to the coalition that had received the most votes.
The results were celebrated by the opposition as a sign of a brake against populism and euroscepticism, while Babiš attributed his defeat on the one hand to his ANO party, and on the other to Prague, historically a more progressive city than the rest of the country.
