Billionaire Prime Minister Andrej Babis’ centrist party appears to have lost the Czech Republic‘s parliamentary election after the populist party failed to win a majority in Saturday’s nail-bitingly final moments at the ballot box.
The results mean opposition coalitions could now join forces to grab power in the country and dethrone Babis’ ANO party, according to the Czech Statistical Office. With 99.79% of votes counted, the centre-right three-party alliance Spolu (Together) leads the count with 27.74% of the ballots, followed by Babiš’s ANO (Yes) party with 27.17%, and the centrist PirStan coalition with 15.57%.
The two-day election to fill 200 seats in the lower house of the Czech Republic’s parliament took place shortly after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported details of Babis’ overseas financial dealings in a project dubbed the “Pandora Papers.”
However, the 67-year-old leader has denied wrongdoing.
“The two democratic coalitions have gained a majority and have a chance to form a majority government,” said Petr Fiala, Together’s leader and its candidate for prime minister, according to Associated Press reports.
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Meanwhile, both the Social Democrats and the Communists, the country’s traditional parliamentary parties, failed to win seats in parliament for the first time since the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993.
Babis’ term as a Prime Minister was tarnished by numerous scandals, but all public polls before the vote had favoured his ANO party to win the election.
“We didn’t expect to lose,” Babis said. “We accept that.” However, he still declared the election results “excellent.”
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Next, President Milos Zeman, as he previously indicated, will first appoint the leader of the winning party, not the winning coalition, to try to form a new government, which would be Babis.
The two leaders will meet on Sunday.
But Babis and his potential partner, the Freedom party, will need to win a parliamentary confidence vote to rule, which they don’t have enough support for.