Andrej Babis surely understands the difference between democracy and efficient organisation. And yet he seeks to obliterate this difference in the minds of citizens.


Andrej Babis is convinced that the administration of the political system is the prerogative of specially qualified experts (like himself).

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been reduced to a simple struggle between classes, with the difference being that today the scientific socialist has been replaced by an efficient manager and the wicked capitalist by a greedy politician.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

Our ability effectively to resist a fledgling dictator when we elect one, or to confront the blatant conflicts of interest of the Czech 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. 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. The combination is potentially lethal to democratic politics. It would not be the first time that this country has seen an authoritarian figure make use of the democratic political system in order to undermine it. Think of Klement Gottwald between 1946-1948.

Babis may make government efficient in spite of his dubious past and flawed character. But he will never make it good without citizens capable of political judgment. By far the single most important reason why Andrej 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. 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