Adenoid Hynkel and Arturo Ui are parodies of the modern dictator. Now the Czech Republic has a parody of its own.



"I'm sorry. I don't want to be a politician. That's not my business. I don't want to rule anyone..."

Parody transforms the sublime into the ridiculous, which is why it is a good defence against power. There have been many parodies made of modern dictators over the years, such as Charlie Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel and Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui. Now the Czech Republic has a parody of its very own.

Brecht described The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all'. It tells the story of a small-time Chicago mobster and his takeover of the city's greengrocery trade – cauliflowers to be precise.

Andrej Babis is no dictator. But he makes an excellent parody of one. Unlike Adenoid and Arturo, he wears no uniform or black Fedora (although that coat is not so far from Frank Lucas’s fateful Chinchila outfit in Ridley Scott's American Gangster.) Nor does Babis kill his competitors –he acquires them instead.

Until today, Babis had at his disposal considerable economic and media power. From today, he has extraordinary political power as well. He may use this power to restore the legitimacy of a sovereign parliament or to undermine it still further. I tend towards the second interpretation.

Like his outspoken adviser, Robert Pelikan, I have no doubt that our new finance minister will use his power to catch criminals. “This year will be used for determining where the assets and money are”, as Babis put it soon after being sworn in as finance minister yesterday.

However, unlike Pelikan, who insists that Babis has no conflicts of interest, I do doubt his good faith. To be sure, Babis is intent on catching baddies, but which baddies? The full force of the state’s most formidable executive office will be directed at uncovering abuse and mismanagement, but whose abuse and whose mismanagement? Certainly not his own.

Babis will wage war on waste and corruption, and on whatever else he considers inexpert, inefficient and incompetent. But what he considers inefficient, others might consider democratic. We shall miss the largely meaningless competition and endless bickering between political parties when they are all replaced by experts.

Babis will thrill us all by exposing the abuses of the past committed by the likes of Kalousek and Chalupa. He has no Tommy gun in his violin case. He will use asset declarations and FAU instead to deal with the baddies. Let us hope the finance minister's interest in other people's assets is a healthy one, and not targeted at his competitors and critics.

And voters will be so ecstatic to see Chalousek & Kalupa (forgive me, but you are interchangeable) exposed that they won’t bother too much about the crooks left in place. And they will no doubt grant Babis yet more political power in elections to come –him and his ugly sister, Tomio Okamura.

Babis will not abuse his new power, of this Pelikan is sure: “I would hardly cooperate with him otherwise.” Another believer in the purity of Babis’s motives is Vera Jourova, his new minister for the dispensing of millions in EU funds. Jourova is more emphatic than Pelikan, describing Babis as a visionary beyond the reach of the temptations that confront ordinary men and women.

There is no danger of Babis’s co-workers viewing him through what a real dictator, Joseph Goebbels, sneeringly dismissed as “the mildew of an ostensible objectivity”. They have seen the future through the brilliant focus of their own ambitions, and it is Babis. Many others, a million and growing, have seen the future as well, through the clouded spectacles of their own frustration at the failure of political parties, and it is Babis that they see there.

Babis openly despises democratic politicians. People love him for it. But people overlook the fact that, however corrupt they have become, these very same politicians were elected in free and fair elections, year after year. Babis may yet become the punishment people have brought upon themselves.

To be sure, Babis is no servant of narrow partisan interests. He transcends, or better said, circumvents, political parties. And people love him for it. But people overlook the fact that these very same parties, which have ruled the country for two decades, have provided Agrofert’s 200 businesses with vast sums of public money in the form of subsidies over the years. Babis is an outstanding example of a beneficiary of two systems he now claims to despise, the one that came before 1989 and the one that came after.

Babis is determined to remodel politics in his own, faintly comic, managerial image. He has no time for the messy collegial habits on which democratic decision making depends. He treats every organization, not as a college, but as a hierarchy in which the leader holds absolute sway in his own domain. No partisan deputy ministers can be allowed to come between an ANO minister and the efficient execution of his responsibilities.

This rejection of partisan limitations in the name of organisational efficiency is rather popular again. But even if Babis has the motives of a saint, what happens if he gets run over by a tractor or if he just gets bored? Who will step into the institutional void he leaves behind him?

Andrej may no longer be the formal head of his business conglomerate but he does not need to be. He owns it. In addition to controlling a sizeable chunk of the country’s economy, he now combines in his person a hefty slice of the country’s legislative and executive power, as well as its national press. Today we read that MfD has not renewed the contract of an editor who had, coincidentally, written critical pieces on Babis’s conflicts of interest. Perhaps Vladimir Sevela was just a crappy journalist.

What remains beyond Andrej’s reach, at least for now, is the country’s judicial power. The unspoken word of Andrej Babis might pass for law in the editorial meetings of national newspapers and the offices of half a dozen government ministries. But he is not, at least not yet, the law.

In short, Andrej Babis is a simulacrum of a dictator, an intimation of what lies ahead if we allow this new politics of experts to replace, rather than to resuscitate, the institution of the political party.