Czech Citizens Protest Prime Minister As Velvet Revolution Anniversary Looms

The protests against Prime Minister Babis were the largest in the Czech Republic since the Velvet Revolution. (AFP)

A quarter million Czech citizens took to the streets of Prague on November 16, protesting Prime Minister Andrej Babis’s alleged corruption and greed. Protestors gathered in Letna Park with posters and chanted criticism of the billionaire prime minister, who narrowly evaded charges of fraud after Prague courts cleared him last month.

The protests came on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. Named for its relative nonviolence, the Velvet Revolution toppled Czechoslovakia's Communist Party after police brutally repressed a students’ march on November 17, 1989. By December, the Communist Party had agreed to cede power, leading to the nation’s first free elections and eventual dissolution into the Czech Republic (now, Czechia) and Slovakia.

While the Czechia’s post-Communist history was initially marked by economic progress and liberalization of previously repressive laws, the election of the populist Babis came within a context of democratic turmoil. Babis’s ANO party rose to power in 2017 following the four-year term of the center-left government. Unable to gain a majority, ANO formed a minority cabinet, giving Babis weak control over a government already roiling from a party change. 

Babis’s tenure as prime minister, moreover, has not been a smooth one. He came into power under suspicion of fraud after allegedly obtaining an illegal €2 million ($2.2 million) subsidy in 2008 and was only acquitted of those charges on September 4. Months before his acquittal, on June 23, protesters gathered at Letna Park—the site of similar protests under the former communist regime—and demanded Babis’s resignation. The protest was the largest in Czechia since the Velvet Revolution. 

Babis’s refusal to acknowledge the protesters and their exhortations to resign has riled the nation’s university students, most of whom were not alive at the time of the Velvet Revolution, but who are recycling many of the mottos, slogans, and tactics employed by dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia. Most notably, protesters chanted “we are here,” a rallying cry of the Velvet Revolution, and speakers at the protest included those who had participated in the 30-year-old revolution. 

“His huge conflict of interest, his lies, fraud, there's too much of that. He's not an honest man,” protester Josef Plandor, a forestry worker, said of Babis.

Backed by the government as well as Czech President Milos Zeman, Babis has given little indication that he intends to respond to the protests with resignation. 

“Demonstrations are part of [the] democratic system in Czechia,” Babis said. “People can demonstrate against me or the government, and I respect their right to do so.”