On October 3 and 4, 2025, the Czech Republic held its quadrennial Chamber of Deputies (Lower house of Parliament) election, which resulted in a decisive victory for ANO 2011, a right-wing populist party run by billionaire and ex-Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. While the election itself is widely considered free and fair, Babiš and the nature of ANO 2011 pose a threat to democracy, and the institutions of the Czech political system are too divided and weak to stop it. 

Babiš’s basic ideology, around which ANO was built, is antithetical to democracy. The party is hard to categorize along traditional political lines. Originally, it was left of center, but it has since moved significantly and is currently best described as right-wing – Babiš is occasionally described as “the Czech Donald Trump”. The widespread conclusion is that his policies are “flexible” – a concept that in itself poses danger to democracy. As Taub describes in ‘Game Theory of Democracy,’ the preservation of a democratic system relies on low stakes of power. However, ANO’s sudden changes in political position (Babiš was expected to align with a left-leaning coalition up until they failed to win seats) raise the stakes of elections: there’s no way for his opponents to know if he will enact minor policy changes or pose a major threat to their interests, forcing them to treat everything as existential, and weakening democracy. Babiš is also clearly populist according to Muller’s definition: both anti-elite – often blaming the “system” or bureaucracy for Czech struggles – and anti-pluralist, advocating for the possibility of single-party government, and completely discounting the current government as “disregard[ing] the people”. As Muller warned, Babiš’s populism has led him to view other parties as illegitimate, undermining the democratic norm of mutual tolerance that both Levitsky (2016) and Huq & Ginsberg argue is key to avoiding democratic erosion.

To understand ANO, it’s vital to understand the Czech political system. Czechia has a large multi-party system with a Prime Minister as well as a President, and has been known as one of the strongest democracies in the former Eastern Bloc region. Then-Czechoslovakia was under communist rule from the end of WW2 until the peaceful “Velvet Revolution” in 1989, and Communism has remained an issue in Czech politics. While far-left parties like KSČM retained strong parliamentary holds in the mid-late 1990s to 2010s, they’ve since been increasingly sidelined. The lingering anti-communist sentiment in Czechia has amplified over the past two decades. Today, the liberal-centrist STAN and Piráti are the only two non-right-wing seat-holding parties. 

A major weak point of Czech democracy is its makeup. ANO is one of four center-right political parties, differentiating itself from the other three (which make up the Spolu coalition) only in being populist. Other parties winning seats this fall include STAN and Piráti, far-right SPD, and AUTO (represents car drivers’ interests). The presence of more than 5 competing parties places them under a system Linz calls “polarized plurualism”. Matching his descriptions, there are antisystem parties, intense polarization between ANO and Spolu (<5% of voters willing to cross the divide), and some parties taking increasingly drastic measures to try to draw votes. Linz warns in ‘The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes’ (1978) of the risky instability that this kind of system creates.

The necessities for parties acting in a polarized pluralist system account for the dangerous difference in this iteration of ANO leadership compared to the last one. In his 2017 victory, Babiš relied on a coalition with left-center Socialist Democrats to earn the majority. In 2021, loss of support for left-leaning parties and the creation of a tentative anti-populist coalition between Spolu, STAN, and Piráti managed to defeat incumbent ANO, removing Andrej Babiš as PM, but it was plagued by internal tension and international crisis (Ukraine, Covid), allowing ANO to reclaim the plurality in the Chamber of Deputies this fall with a 34.7%, compared to Spolu’s 23.2%. To form a majority government, ANO has made a dramatic shift and aligned itself with the anti-system party SPD. SPD openly resists the EU, NATO, and democracy itself, advocating for the abolition of the Senate (Upper Parliament) and significant media restrictions, making them what Linz would call a ‘disloyal opposition’ fundamentally opposed to the democratic system. Their actions align with Varol’s signs of ‘Stealth Authoritarianism’, and subvert the free press Dahl postulates as essential to democracy. 

These events reflect Linz’s concerns: fractured parties are struggling to govern together, and Babiš’s major ideological shift shows the lengths he’s willing to go to cement his power. ANO poses a semi-loyal opposition to Spolu: willing to work within democracy when convenient, but prepared to ally with the disloyal SPD parties to gain power. Linz explains that allowing disloyal opposition into positions of power like this is dangerous to democracy, and that the only option to stop this is for the political community to work together to freeze out disloyal opposition. Spolu tried to do this when they aligned with STAN and Piráti – creating a very unlikely and politically broad governing coalition in the name of stopping ANO, but the nature of the political system meant that they were too incompatible, leading them to fail this fall.

Babiš has shown through his alignment with SPD that he doesn’t always confine himself to the rules of democracy, but does his election spell authoritarianism? Not yet. Levitsky explains that autocrats often rise to power through democratic means, as popular (often populist) “charismatic outsiders”, but Babiš’s willingness to concede power in 2021 shows that, at least then, he wasn’t a would-be autocrat by Linz’s standards. Additionally, Czech President Petr Pavel is expected to use his somewhat limited power to resist any attempt to leave NATO or the EU, which should limit ANO/SPD. The admission of populist and anti-system forces into government at all, however, significantly weakens Czech democracy, and it’s up to the rest of the system to do what they can to limit backsliding.