Overnight, Andrej Babis has made a hero of Dalibor Balsinek –and a fool of himself.



Adenoid Hynkel

If you did not know that Andrej Babis was the finance minister of an EU member state, you could easily be forgiven for mistaking him for a stand-up comic playing the part of a wicked dictator. Yesterday, he chose a cabinet press conference on foreign policy to show off his not inconsiderable talent for comedy.

Side by side with the Czech Republic’s prime minister and foreign minister, its finance minister abruptly changed into Adenoid Hynkel, the reluctant dictator played by Charlie Chaplin. In front of the assembled media, and to the obvious amusement of his cabinet colleagues, Andrej Babis launched into an astonishing, incoherent and entirely personal attack on a business competitor, ECHO24, the Czech news and current affairs server launched last week. Many of ECHO24’s journalists were working for the Czech daily Lidove noviny until Babis bought it and Mlada Fronta Dnes a few months ago.( see Andrej's adenoidal skit in Czech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rYVbDm-yty0 )

Frauds in the pockets of losers

In a rhetorical style that can only be described as ‘zemanoid’, Babis dismissed the journalists as frauds in the pockets of losers. To begin with, they had 'embezzled' Lidove noviny. This is quite funny. Since Babis took over, LN has been transformed from a mediocre newspaper only worth buying at weekends, into a mouthpiece of an oligarch worth buying everyday but only if you want to see into the paranoid mind of an acquisitive billionaire. Or you could attend cabinet press conferences instead.

Adenoid Andrej went on to call the journalists ‘fans of ODS’. This is even funnier. ODS has no fans. Warming to his theme, and encouraged by the giggles and smirks of the prime minister and foreign minister standing beside him, the finance minister accused the journalists of working to the orders of Miroslav Kalousek. This was the funniest joke so far. Kalousek can hardly get his own party colleagues to follow his orders these days (his mayors are revolting), let alone a bunch of lazy hacks.

Laying it on with his comic trowel, the finance minister then called the man who finances ECHO24 a frontman for Martin Roman. But Babis must know that Roman has wasted enough of his money on one failing media venture already. Roman may be many things but he is not a philanthropist.

And for good measure, the absolute owner of two daily newspapers and a popular radio station threatened to use his considerable powers, albeit as finance minister (we must be fair to the man), to punish the ‘so-called journalists’ from ECHO24.

But the last laugh lies with Dalibor Balsinek, the proprietor and editor-in-chief of ECHO24. Andrej Babis has just provided ECHO24 with a million crowns worth of free publicity, and its proprietor with a deep fund of credibility on which he may draw for years to come.

Nothing could have done more for Balsinek’s troubled reputation for sacrificing truth to power than to be attacked by power itself. Overnight, Dalibor Balsinek has become what we all so much want him to be: a real journalist who kicks greedy politicians in the arse.

And Andrej Babis has become what many always knew him to be: a comic dictator.