Andrej Babis surely understands the difference between democracy and efficient organisation. And yet he obliterates this difference in the minds of ordinary people.




Andrej Babis, with his lawyer, going in for questioning by the anti-corruption unit of the police in connection with the privatisation of Unipetrol to PKN Orlen, November 2006.

“In Adolf Eichmann, we confront the paradigmatic figure of the unthinking and unjudging non-citizen of our times. If he replies: ‘This is not murder, it is good management, efficient organisation’, is this faulty judgment, poor judgment, or does it fail to qualify as judgment at all?” Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment*

If Andrej Babis is to be believed, Czech politics after a pause of 25 years have once again been reduced to a simple struggle between classes, with the difference (if you can call it that) being that the scientific socialist has been replaced by an efficient manager, and the wicked capitalist by a greedy politician.

For an alarming number of people, this juxtaposition of two stereotypes - the able, disinterested expert and the stupid, bent politician - is a persuasive one, persuasive enough to cause a million or more citizens to vote for a man who treats them as his subordinates.

In a country in which the political system is now built upon the free competition between imperfect political parties, the attempt to replace politicians with expert administrators might be thought a backwards step, a retreat even into despair from the mess of a failing democratic politics. The single exception to the constitutionally grounded political monopoly held by parties is the institution of a directly elected president, which is a very recent and an already discredited exception.

The effort to replace elected party politicians with appointed experts demeans the citizen. It encourages him to give up political responsibility for his government to others apparently better qualified than himself. This is dangerous nonsense reminiscent of the recent past, a past in which a privileged class of scientific socialists like Andrej Babis were working for state-controlled monopolies like Petrimex.

How can these self-appointed experts ever hope to bring about lasting good government by removing from the governed the freedom to choose idiots and crooks to rule over them? Was the appointed idiot Milos Jakes any better at governing than the elected crook Miroslav Kalousek?

Our ability effectively to resist a fledgling dictator when we elect one, or to confront the blatant conflicts of interest of our new finance minister, requires us to make political judgments. How are we to develop this common human faculty other than through its regular exercise? And how are we to exercise it if we leave all the judging to experts?

The technocrat, as epitomised by Andrej Babis, seeks to persuade voters that the executive branch of government should be handed over to people like him who claim to belong to an allegedly superior managerial species. The rest of us are to become passive bystanders. No thanks!

This is the civic equivalent of a voluntary frontal lobotomy. What happens to the citizen (not the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, but the citizen) who accepts this understanding of his role in the public life of his country? He becomes what the political philosopher Ronald Beiner* termed a ‘would-be’ citizen, and in the worst case, a non-citizen:

“Convinced that the administration of the political system is the prerogative of specially qualified experts and that the opinion of the ordinary citizen fails to satisfy the established canons of rationality, the would-be citizen retreats to his own private domain where political frustration and malaise well up.”

Indeed. This retirement into private life, prompted by our disappointment in democratic politics, will become permanent if we are to lose even the semblance of competition between political parties.

There are many reasons why, in my opinion, Andrej Babis is quite unable to restore good government to this country. These include his absolutist, controlling nature and the feebleness of his genuinely political opponents, a feebleness that will become clear when Babis gets his hands on their asset declarations. The combination is potentially lethal to democratic politics.

Do not forget the damaged seed out of which those Babis billions grew. No one has yet discovered who stood behind the mysterious Swiss firm which owned fifty-five per cent of Agrofert in December 2001, the month that prime minister Milos Zeman tried ever so hard to sell the Czech petrochemicals industry, otherwise known as Unipetrol, to Agrofert. And even though Agrofert offered much less for a majority stake in Unipetrol than a British company called Rotch Energy, Agrofert was chosen. Unipetrol is a dirty word in the Babis household. The 2001 sale had to be aborted after Agrofert failed to come up with the money. Three years later, Agrofert’s second attempt to get a piece of the Unipetrol pie ended badly after Babis fell out with the Polish state-owned petrochemicals firm, PKN Orlen, his partner in the consortium to buy Unipetrol. It is not only the chickens from Poland that Babis considers inferior.

You can (and you should) remind yourselves of the origins of those Babis billions by re-reading Jaroslav Spurny’s excellent coverage of Agrofert over the years in the weekly Respekt, in English and in Czech. Try this one from May 2002: http://respekt.ihned.cz/c1-36325060-the-richest-czech-keeps-a-secret

Andrej Babis may make government efficient in spite of his past and in spite of his character. But he will never make it good without citizens capable of political judgment. By far the single most important reason why Babis will retard the emergence of a grown-up politics, a politics in which those in power are held to account by their fellow citizens, is his contempt for the political judgment of ordinary people.

I doubt the soundness of Andrej Babis's political judgment. But I do not doubt that he retains the faculty to judge. Babis most surely understands the difference between democracy and efficient organisation. And yet he is determined to obliterate this difference in the minds of ordinary people.

Andrej Babis appears actually to want us to relinquish responsibility for our political arrangements to him, which is why, when all is said and done, he is an enemy of the thinking, judging citizen.


*Here is an accessible review of Ronald Beiner’s Political Judgment, with details of the book itself. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/19/books/what-s-a-citizen-to-do.html