Czech Politics at a Crossroads?

Abstract

Since 2010, Czech voters have turned their backs on the four long-standing parties that used to constitute the core of the party system, and have flocked to new, often populist alternatives. The most successful of these is ANO (‘yes’), the party of the Andrej Babiš, who won the 2017 election convincingly and went on to form a minority government – the first in thirty years to rely on Communist support. However, the self-proclaimed democratic opposition united against Babiš and secured a comfortable majority in the 2021 election. This chapter investigates how the rise of new parties has changed the Czech party system; and how these parties differ from the longstanding parties in terms of organization as well as parliamentary elites.