The slave mentality and a win for Babiš - why extremism and populism are getting stronger in the Czech Republic

Babiš is a populist politician who, in the spirit of the “political culture” of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, follows an “alternative truth”, in other words, the idea that he can tell lies, slander people, deny reality, break the law and grab everything for himself whenever he likes without fear of reprisal. The subsidies financed from our common resources which Babiš has allocated to his Agrofert conglomerate have increased. The salaries and working conditions for the laborers in some of Agrofert’s firms have not.

CZK 65.50 [EUR 2.60] per hour

In a series of reportages for the Czech daily Alarm called “Heroes of Capitalist Labor”, Saša Uhlová has described salaries close to the minimum wage and working conditions appropriate for the 19th century – she took jobs in different Czech firms for a while and then described her experiences there.

“In the ad they offered CZK 13,500 [EUR 540] gross per month and in the contract I just signed it was stated as CZK 65.50 [EUR 2.60] per hour. The human resources staffer warned me that they have two shifts a day and that the morning shifts are very early. The first one starts at midnight from Sunday to Monday, on Tuesday it starts at 4 AM, and for the rest of the week it starts normally at 6 AM. Along with the contract I signed a commitment to work overtime that applies to almost all the afternoon shifts. The afternoon shifts don’t end until the work is done,” Uhlová writes in a 2017 reportage on working for the firm called Vodňanská drůbež [Poultry from Vodňany], which is part of Agrofert.

She also describes the working conditions: “I never knew how long the afternoon shift would take, so I was greatly relieved when I could go home to the residential hotel after 11 hours. It wasn’t until I left that I realized I almost couldn’t walk… When I leaned against a counter once for a few seconds, Oana told me to be careful about doing that, since I could be fined for it. There were never any chairs there, so even if there was a moment when one was waiting for something to do, one couldn’t even sit down.”

That reportage is still worth reading today, as the reader indirectly learns a great deal about Babiš from it. The question is how it can be possible that even the most impoverished people are also his voters, even though several of them must know the workers in his firms are being exploited in the most repugnant way. Is it because they do not hear political support for them from anybody else? Probably yes, but other reasons exist for this as well.

Today, in 2024, Vodňanská drůbež offers its workers in its production facilities CZK 29,000 [EUR 1,160] gross per month, in other words, about CZK 15,000 [EUR 600] less than the monthly minimum wage in the Czech Republic (CZK 43,967 or EUR 1,750). The median wage in the second quarter this year was CZK 38,529 [EUR 1,500]. (The median wage, unlike the average wage, represents the level of wages paid to employees who are exactly at the midpoint of the distribution – half of all employees earn higher wages than they do and half earn lower wages.)

In November 2023, Vodňanská drůbež was still offering workers just CZK 17,940 [EUR 715] per month for full-time work. This was still for the two-shift operations Uhlová described in her reportage. “The average gross monthly wage in grocery production was CZK 34,036 [EUR 1,360] at that time, according to the Czech Statistical Office,” Forum 24 reported. Another Agrofert firm, Kostelecké uzeniny [Charcuterie from Kostelec] is currently offering the workers in its grocery production facilities just CZK 21,480 [EUR 860] gross per month.

Let’s remember this when Babiš & Co. start yelling in their populist way about somebody’s low wages or low pensions. While he is determined to distribute somebody else’s money (i.e., from our taxes) no matter how indebted the state becomes, Babiš pays far below average wages out of his own money for people to do unbelievably hard work in catastrophic working conditions.

How Babiš grabbed what he wanted

The subsidies awarded to Agrofert when Babiš was seated in various cabinets rose to astronomical heights. In 2010 they totalled just CZK 250 million [EUR 10 million]. In 2021, when Babiš ended as PM, they totalled CZK 2.25 billion [EUR 90 million]. In 2022, of course, he was still receiving CZK 2 billion [EUR 80 million] in subsidies from the state coffers and another subsidy worth hundreds of millions of Czech crowns from the EU budget, as the daily Forum 24 reported. Altogether in 2022 he acquired more than CZK 6 billion [EUR 240,000,000] in public funds, including incentives and tax breaks for his conglomerate in Hungary and Slovakia. Agrofert’s pure profit in 2022 was CZK 12.27 billion [EUR 490,000,000]. His profits fell to CZK 2 billion [EUR 80 million] last year. Last year Agrofert paid Babiš “just” CZK 111 million [EUR 4.4 million] – one could even feel sorry for him.

According to the Pirate Party, by 2022 Agrofert had accumulated a total of at least CZK 16,805,741,000 [EUR 670 million] in state subsidies. Of that, approximately CZK 3,940,588,000 [EUR 157 million] were investment subsidies and CZK 12,865,153,000 [EUR 513 million] were operational subsidies.

Babiš reported high earnings this year too, as can be seen from the asset statement that all lawmakers must publish. “He received… CZK 111.1 million [EUR 4.4 million] from his Agrofert holding. The Banka Vontobel sent more than CZK 605,000 [EUR 24,000] and CZK 10.7 [EUR 427,000] to accounts held by Babiš. The Imoba company, which owns Čapí hnízdo [The Stork’s Nest], sent him CZK 9.1 million [EUR 363,000]. From another firm controlled by Agrofert, První žatecké, he received CZK 13,714 [EUR 547]. The Czech Social Security Administration paid him CZK 286,310 [EUR 11,400]. He was paid CZK 192,400 [EUR 7,675] from Slovak Social Security,” the daily SeznamZprávy.cz reports.

The Agrofert concern also lives off of state commissions. Last year those reached a record high, when it won state contracts worth almost CZK 10 billion [EUR 400 million]. An abundant number of Czech state bureaucrats are owned by Babiš and do their jobs even when ANO is in the opposition.

How Babiš treats the environment badly, how he treats those who block his interests, and his merciless trade practices have been written about by the investigative journalist Jaroslav Kmenta, the journalist Jakub Patočka and the Deník Referendum news server.

The return to slavery

In the first decade of the Czech Republic’s existence, a person like Babiš could never have enjoyed such great success in politics. Along with the changes that have accompanied the lightning-fast pace of globalization, the influx of information of different levels of quality, the empty phrases and disinformation in the media, the increasing superficiality that has grown throughout all of society, and the rise of the Internet, the values which our civilization acknowledges as a whole have very much been weakened, mainly the values of truth, of freedom, and the idea that everybody enjoys equal civil and human rights.

In postcommunist countries this has multiplied the repercussions of totalitarianism: People lack inner freedom in this common, free space. What I mean by inner freedom is the ability and the willingness to make one’s own choices, to make one’s own decisions, and to act according to one’s own will. If a person is governed by his negative emotions, then he does not have inner freedom. In other words, we did not much know how to cope with the freedom we gained, because our 40-year pilgrimage through the desert seeking liberation from slavery was actually still ahead of us. We are making our way through that desert, but we lack a Moses to lead us in the right direction.

Globalization involves both negative and positive phenomena. They have left their mark on people living in run-of-the-mill democracies too. This is not just about Trump and his voters. Let’s recall Berlusconi, the oligarch who wanted to evade the courts through staying in power (just like Netanyahu in Israel today, etc.), let’s recall Hungary and Orbán who has grown into an intolerant dictator, let’s recall the Kaczyńskis in Poland and Fico & Co. in Slovakia, who are willing to sacrifice liberal democracy at any time to their own ideas and their deeply-rooted hatred of their political rivals, let’s recall the rise of ultra-right parties in Austria, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and other countries. The danger to liberal democracy has never been as intense as it is today. The trend tells us that it could soon enter its final climax.

This has already gone dangerously far. ANO voters are not bothered by the fact that Babiš blatantly collaborated with the communist regime and was registered as a secret police agent (an informer) to keep his career afloat, or that he was able to travel abroad for work in those days, as most of his voters considered such collaboration before November ’89 to be an ordinary part of life. They are not bothered by his entry into politics in order to enrich himself at the taxpayers’ expense, because many of them cheerfully stole from the public purse under the communists, following the motto that “Whoever does not steal from the state is stealing from his own family”. ANO voters aren’t even bothered by the fact that their favorite movement has joined the “Patriots for Europe” faction in the European Parliament, where they have concluded a pact with extremist parties and adapted their policies to suit them, and not just in the area of migration and a pro-Russian desire for “peace” with Ukraine. Naturally, the same goes for the Motorists Unite party and the Oath (Přísaha) party, which have balanced on the edge of extremism from the very beginning.

The behavior of the ANO members who accepted Babiš’s idea of ​​an alliance with right-wing extremists in the European Parliament unreservedly is devastating. Naturally they are doing this because they fear for the place at his trough which they have already won for themselves, but it is a testament to the fact that Babiš knows how to select spineless opportunists who are not bothered when liberal democracy turns into some type of autocracy, kleptocracy and oligarchy, including the modern forms of fascism which, of course, are continuations of the past forms. (A kleptocracy is a government in which the representatives of state power enrich themselves personally to the detriment of society). Many ANO voters are close to such opportunism, as are other extremists and populists, because they were always inclined toward it as part of their own collaboration with power during the previous regime. (Opportunism is adaptability, the exploitation of opportunities, a lack of principle, abandoning principles for the prospect of immediate personal benefit.)

ANO voters’ behavior is caused exactly by their lack of inner freedom, which makes it possible for them to return to the old models of behavior, to thinking in the communist way, to the clichés and phrases once in use here. When the Jewish people were wandering through the desert after their own liberation from slavery, they wanted to return to Egypt, a place where they had been slaves, but also had security, and to return to the Egyptian gods. For that reason, they made a golden calf and worshipped it, just at the time when Moses spoke with God and received the Ten Commandments from him. The same mentality applies to the current Czech slaves who were freed not long ago.

What are the Czech democratic parties doing against authoritarianism, populism, and ultra-conservatism? One wants to say they are doing nothing, but that wouldn’t be the whole truth. Their policies frequently directly play into the hands of Babiš, Okamura and Turek. My next commentary will be about that.