Andrej Babiš launched a recruitment drive yesterday for the voters of SPD and ČSSD, saying that the leaders of these two parties (Tomio Okamura and Michal Šmarda) betrayed their voters by directly or indirectly supporting right-wing Petr Pavel in the presidential elections. Babiš is a predator in business and politics and wants to scoop up all of the roughly 50% of the voters who aren’t already taken by the ruling parties. Babiš’s strategy seems to be to target the likeminded disgruntled voters of all of the other opposition parties now and to wait for the members of the ruling coalition to lose voters by enacting “anti-social” policies. ANO warned before the first round of the presidential elections against a “brutal belt-tightening,” and last night Vice Chair Alena Schillerová rattled off several of the social assurances that the Fiala government is “barbarically demolishing.” This includes raising the pension age, the VAT on basic items and the real-estate property taxes. Timing is everything in politics, and Babiš lost the presidential race in part because the elections came at least several months too soon. Time is now on his side.

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