Miroslav Kalousek made an awful finance minister. But he is the only opposition parliamentarian today able to stand up to Andrej Babis.



I am not acquisitive!

‘Nothing became Cawdor’s life like the leaving of it.’ And nothing, perhaps, becomes Miroslav Kalousek’s power like the losing of it. This loss, far from reducing Kalousek, has given him a new role and one to which he is much better suited –that of resisting the rise of Andrej Babis and other celebrity politicians like Tomio Okamura.

Kalousek made a truly awful finance minister. But he is an outstanding politician in opposition –which is just as well given that, these days, with CSSD and KDU-CSL in bed with Babis, Okamura at his feet and ODS in ruins, Miroslav Kalousek and TOP 09 are the opposition.

ANO 2011 has no Hasek nor does it have any faction, says Babis. This is clear. If only it had! Agrofert’s absolute owner will soon be adding six government ministries to his fast expanding portfolio of assets (at least they will be well run, I hear you say), which includes two national newspapers and the country’s most popular radio station. He is hoping to acquire a local bank as well.

There is no effective countervailing power to Andrej Babis within his political movement and business. And those who would resist him, in politics and in the media, are divided, demoralised and underfunded.

The reason why it is in the public interest that Babis be finance minister is because it would highlight his conflicts of interest and so make them easier to manage. Bohuslav Sobotka’s hope of hiding these conflicts by sweeping them under a deputy prime minister’s carpet is the worst outcome of all because it is so deceitful.

As for ODS, it has lost all its authority. Petr Necas, the one person in the party who might have been able to provide some credible counterbalance to Babis, is ruined. The public prosecutor’s leak yesterday of taped conversations between Necas and Nagyova, apart from being a scandalous abuse of the prosecutor’s power, is yet another devastating blow to ODS. The leak purports to show that Necas traded his signature on the Klaus amnesty for Klaus’s signature on the Necas government tax reforms. In Necas’s own words, ‘the amnesty is a ghastly cock-up...to be quite open, it was signature for a signature.’ (‘Amnestie je strašný průšvih...může říct otevřeně, že šlo o podpis za podpis’.) Petr Fiala might revive ODS, but whether he can do so soon enough to restrain Babis before he grows too powerful to restrain, that is the question.

No, the dismal truth is that the only meaningful opposition to Andrej Babis today, at least in the country’s supreme legislative body, is Miroslav Kalousek –a measure of how very precarious the politics of this country have now become.

Those, like ANO's Vera Jourova, who claim to know what motivates Andrej Babis, say he is a visionary far beyond the reach of the kind of material greed we see in other politicians. Perhaps Mrs Jourova is right (although the scale of Babis’s acquisitiveness strikes this author as biblical.) But while we wait to discover what kind of person Babis really is, I shall remain grateful for the very small mercy that is Miroslav Kalousek.