Czech Populist Is Clear Winner in Parliamentary Elections

Billionaire populist Andrej Babis and his ANO (Yes) party were declared the winners of the Czech parliamentary elections Saturday,

With votes from nearly all polling stations counted, ANO received 29.7 percent of the votes, the national statistical office said — an insurmountable margin for the competition.

Babis, who has been called the “Czech Trump” by international media and has drawn comparisons to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, ran a campaign on opposition to refugee immigration and against closer European Union integration.

Babis, at a rally in Prague, said he hoped for the rapid formation of a new government after he invited the heads of all parties to talks.

He said his opponents and the media have accused him of a “disinformation campaign.”

“We are not a danger for democracy,” Babis said.

Babis’s ANO won only 18.7 percent of the votes in the 2013 election, making it the second-strongest force in Parliament at the time.

The conservative opposition Civic Democrats came in second place with 11.3 percent of the vote, though party Chairman Petr Fiala rejected the prospect of an alliance with Babis.

“We will be fighting for values, a struggle for the Czech Republic’s foreign policy, a struggle for everything that has hitherto been taken for granted,” Fiala said.

The radically anti-immigration Freedom and Direct Democracy party of Japanese-Czech businessman Tomio Okamura won 10.6 percent support.

“We want to stop any Islamization in the Czech Republic,” Okamura said. His former party, the Dawn of Freedom and Democracy, won 6.9 percent four years ago.

Support for the Social Democrats plummeted from 20.5 percent in 2013 to 7.5 percent Saturday.

A record 31 different parties with 7,500 candidates competed for 200 seats in the country’s lower chamber of Parliament, the more powerful of the legislature’s two bodies.

President Milos Zeman already said that he would hand the mandate to form the government to the party with the most votes.