Foreign Policy: Likely Next Czech Prime Minister Will Get Along Great With Trump

In an interview for Foreign Policy, our director Vladimír Bartovic commented on Sobotka's recent attempt to tender the resignation of his entire coalition government.

In an interview for Foreign Policy, our director Vladimír Bartovic commented on Sobotka's recent attempt to tender the resignation of his entire coalition government. 

Babis is “definitely illiberal,” said Vladimir Bartovic of the Prague-based EUROPEUM, a think tank. Sobotka, he explained, is a typical western style social democrat who values values. In contrast, “Babis is a technocrat of power.” That doesn’t mean he’d necessarily pull a Viktor Orban and set up an illiberal regime as in Hungary. “But his motivation is to have power, and to preserve it.”

He has a tendency to build a kind of a ‘cult of leadership’ around himself, he is considerably outspoken — or as he puts it, ‘proudly politically incorrect’, and he has challenged the existing political system of traditional left and right parties.

If that doesn’t sound familiar enough, Babis has also “been a prolific critic of how the conventional political parties have handled the European migration crisis and the continuously most delicate matter, state corruption."

Read the article on Foreign Policy's website here. 

Vladimír Bartovic
President

Expertise: EU institutional issues, Economic and Monetary Union, € and European budget, Brexit, EU foreign policy, EU enlargement with the focus on Western Balkans, Slovak foreign and domestic policy and economic issues