Czech billionaire Andrej Babis was on track to return to power after securing a decisive victory in a parliamentary election, pledging to undo four years of austerity and curb military aid to Ukraine.

Babis’ populist ANO took 35% of the vote, the party’s best-ever result, data from the Czech Statistics Office showed on Saturday. The coalition of his main rival, Prime Minister Petr Fiala, won 23%.

Campaigning on a Donald Trump-inspired message of placing Czechs first, 71-year-old former premier canvassed the Eastern European nation on a platform of jump-starting economic growth, cutting corporate taxes and ending a regime of belt-tightening.

Tapping voter frustration with the current government’s response to a cost-of-living crisis, Babis promised that he would end policies that were making Czechs poorer — and promote the country’s place in Europe by focusing on transactional politics over values espoused by Brussels.

“Europe is suffering, Europe is not competitive anymore,” Babis told reporters at party headquarters in Prague, pointing to energy prices and regulation. “We want to save Europe — we are clearly pro-European and pro-NATO.”

Babis said he’ll seek to rule alone, with the support of two smaller groups, the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy and the populist upstart Motorists party, as a minority government. That would put the billionaire in position to return to high office after leading the opposition for the last four years.

A comeback would add to a roster of populist leaders in the region — Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico — who have taken aim at European Union institutions. While Babis displayed more pragmatic leadership during his previous term in power, he vowed to buck the EU trend on defense spending and immigration.

Czech President Petr Pavel has said he’ll start talks on forming a coalition on Sunday.

Support for change

With ANO winning every Czech region outside the capital, Fiala’s allies struggled to muster the votes to create a path to stay in power. Mayors and Independents, a party aligned with with the incumbents, secured 11%, while the Czech Pirate Party — a pro-European, liberal party that left Fiala’s coalition in 2024 — took 9%.

The billionaire, who amassed a fortune in agribusiness in the decades after the fall of communism, shook up the Czech political system in 2017 on a vow to root out corruption. In his four years in power, he took aim at the Brussels establishment, oversaw a chaotic pandemic response and became entangled himself in corruption scandals.

During the campaign, Babis said he wants to boost infrastructure and other investments to get the economy grow as much as 4% a year and pledged to bring CEZ AS, the country’s biggest power producer, fully into state hands.

In contrast with Orban and Fico, Babis has never aligned himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But he’s made common cause with populist counterparts on halting migration into Europe.

Orban celebrated the candidate’s victory, saying that “Truth has prevailed!” in the region.

“A big step for the Czech Republic, good news for Europe,” the Hungarian premier said in a statement on social platform X.

One of Babis’ ambitions is to reassert the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary — a group known as the Visegrad Four — as a regional force, uniting the voices of 65 million citizens to have greater sway in the 27-member bloc.

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