Czech Premier Seeks Government Overhaul in Bid to Stop Populists
(Bloomberg) -- A red tape controversy has given the Czech prime minister a chance to revamp his government as the populist opposition leads in the polls.
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Premier Petr Fiala rocked the political scene a year before general elections by firing Regional Development Minister Ivan Bartos over alleged incompetence. Bartos’s Pirate Party, the smallest of the five members of the ruling coalition, called the decision a stab in the back and started an internal vote on Friday whether to quit the administration.
“The departure of the Pirates must be an impulse for the entire coalition to consider how the government could be more efficient, more capable and more convincing before voters,” Fiala said in a video post on the X website.
The unusually aggressive move by the premier comes just days after his center-right coalition’s poor showing in regional elections. The winner of that vote was ANO, the main opposition party of billionaire and former Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who is favored by opinion polls to return to power next fall.
An ally of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, Babis ran record budget deficits during his 2017-2021 administration and embraced anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Fiala’s government, by contrast, has reduced borrowing through unpopular spending curbs and tax increases. It has irked fringe voters by sending military aid to Ukraine and hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees.
After three years without major government scandal, the Czech media recently focused on Bartos’s botched attempt to switch to online processing of building permits. Delays and technical flaws plaguing the new website hindered the coalition’s plans to cut bureaucracy and launch infrastructure projects.
“As prime minister I’m responsible for delivering what we promised to our voters,” said Fiala. “That’s why I decided to resolve the situation quickly and proposed to the president a dismissal of Ivan Bartos.”
Even if the Pirates leave the coalition, the government will still have a comfortable parliamentary majority needed to meet increased targets for defense spending and to fund a recovery after recent devastating floods.
‘More Homogeneous’
Fewer governing partners may also more easily agree on policies, as the four remaining ruling parties tend to be more conservative than the Pirates. The cabinet shakeup could make the coalition more popular, according to Lubomir Kopecek, a political scientist at Masaryk University in Brno.
“This will make the coalition more homogeneous and could give it a fresh start,” he said by phone. “The same may be true for the Pirates, who as an opposition party will be able to go back to their anti-establishment roots.”
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