Czech presidential election: Babiš likens rival to Putin after first-round defeat

The former Czech Republic prime minister Andrej Babiš has set the scene for a bitter presidential election showdown dominated by rows over the country’s communist past by comparing his rival to Vladimir Putin after a surprise first-round poll defeat.

Final tallies after polls closed on Saturday showed Babiš finishing a close second to Gen Petr Pavel, a former army chief of staff and Nato military chair, propelling the pair into a head-to-head ballot on 27-28 January for the right to succeed Miloš Zeman as Czech president.

In an eight-strong field, Pavel won 35.4% of the vote, compared with 34.99% for Babiš, with turnout recorded at 68.23%. The only female candidate, the economist and academic Danuše Nerudová, who was running neck-and-neck with the pair in pre-election surveys, finished a distant third on 13.9%.

Despite the close margin of defeat, the result left the billionaire Babiš facing an uphill struggle to win over the extra voters needed to prevail in the runoff, especially after Nerudová and two other losing candidates, Pavel Fischer and Marek Hilšer, immediately endorsed Pavel after their defeats.

Reflecting the lengthening odds against him, the 68-year-old launched a vitriolic attack on Pavel in a post-results press conference, taking aim at his rival’s past Communist party membership and participation in a military intelligence training course before the 1989 velvet revolution that heralded the end of communism in the former Czechoslovakia.

Painting Pavel as a “government nominee” and ex-communist intelligence officer, Babiš told journalists: “Do you know who else is an intelligence officer at the head of state? Russian president Vladimir Putin. Putin was dropped off and deployed as a KGB agent in the 1980s in Berlin. This is what Mr Pavel was prepared for, to be planted in the rear of the enemy, to get people there to cooperate.”

Babiš, who owns two daily newspapers and the country’s biggest commercial radio station, also claimed plans were afoot to release “compromising” material including doctored photographs, and allegations linking him to the KGB.

His broadside was met with widespread ridicule, with critics highlighting Babiš’s past links to the communist-era secret police, the StB, for which he acted as an informant, according to documents upheld as authentic by the constitutional court in his native Slovakia.

Jiří Pehe, a political analyst and the director of New York University in Prague, said Babiš was trying to persuade liberal-minded supporters of the candidates who had backed Pavel to abstain in the second round.

“The three candidates who endorsed Pavel won 1.2m votes between them and Babiš is doing everything in his power to convince those voters that Pavel is just another a former communist apparatchik and spy,” he said. “But unless something totally unexpected happens, Pavel is going to win. To cross the 50%-plus-one threshold, he needs roughly 500,000 more votes when he has 1.2m at his disposal.”