Adenoid Hynkel and Arturo Ui are parodies of the modern dictator. Now the Czechs have a parody of their own –Andrej Babis.


This is no small-time Chicago mobster. This is the Czech minister of finance (standing outside the HQ of J&T Banka in Bratislava).

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, at least not yet. But he makes an excellent parody of one. Unlike Adenoid and Arturo, he wears no uniform or black Fedora (although that coat with a fur collar 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 2014, Babis had at his disposal considerable economic and media power. Now he holds extraordinary political power as well. He may use this power to restore the legitimacy of a sovereign parliament or to undermine it still further.

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 they see.

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. Like Adenoid Hynkel, he does not want to be a politician. 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. This is the Führer Prinzip. No partisan deputy ministers can be allowed to come between an ANO minister and the efficient execution of his responsibilities.

The rejection of partisan limitations in the name of organisational efficiency is a classical defence of dictators. And 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?

Babis 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.

What remains beyond Babis’s reach, at least for now, is the country’s judicial power. The unspoken word of 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 his new politics of experts to replace, rather than to resuscitate, the institution of the political party.