Neurologist Martin Jan Stránský wrote in MFD on Sat. that it's time to remove Donald Trump for his own good and ours. When the world's most powerful person has such a destructive neuropsychiatric profile, he said, there's too much at stake to ignore it. Stránský didn't mention Andrej Babiš this time, but he wrote in 2023 that Babiš is completely unbalanced and meets the definition of a clinical psychopath. Editor-in-chief Petr Šabata of Právo wrote on July 24 that if Babiš decides to run for president again, it will mean he's lost his sense of judgment more than at any other time in his political career. Petr Honzejk of HN said that there's clearly something going on with Babiš, because he's starting to lose his way on key issues. ANO isn't a normal party that could give Babiš feedback and replace him, Honzejk said, so we can only wait for him to recognize when it's time for him to leave. Maybe not. Petr Kolář, a consultant to Pres. Petr Pavel, told Seznam Zprávy (26:25) that Babiš might not realize that Art. 62 of the Constitution about appointing and removing the PM and ministers doesn't require a co-signature. Babiš needs to start toning things down, Kolář said.
In the imaginary bitcoin Venn diagram we proposed a year ago, the three overlapping circles represented all those who worked on the alleged money-laundering scheme of ex-Justice Min. Pavel Blažek, those who might have profited from it and those who were trying to cover all the tracks. Those in the triple intersection in the center were assumed to be from ODS, including Blažek himself. We didn't even bother to mention convicted internet drug dealer Tomáš Jiřikovský, because by that point he wasn't very important. The bitcoins were his, and he had the proverbial key to the safe, but there was very little reason to keep him in the loop about how the "heist" would be organized. The less he knew the better. Yet the state is now reportedly trying to get him to cooperate by threatening him with 29 years in prison, compared to sentences of 6.5-8 years for the other three who were indicted. The one to strike a deal with is Jiřikovský's lawyer, Kárim Titz, who allegedly organized everything. But that could only happen if the objective were to determine whether certain judges, prosecutors and cabinet members (other than just Blažek) were in the loop too.
STAN's latest effort to take votes from ANO, as announced in recent weeks by Chair Vít Rakušan and other party members, is bearing fruit, according to the new Kantar poll for Czech TV. ANO has lost four percentage points since the elections, Czech TV said, and the biggest slice of this has gone to STAN. Not mentioned by Czech TV (other than in its graph) is that a full 9.0% of respondents chose a party this time that didn't get the 2% of the vote necessary to be identified individually in the poll. That is up from 7.5% in June. This means that "other" rose in the Kantar poll just as fast as STAN and is now in fourth place. Among the parties below the 2% threshold and included in "other" are the Greens, KSČM, PRO, Přísaha, SocDem, Svobodní and Trikolora. Czech TV and Kantar are doing the public a disservice by not breaking out the numbers for these parties. What ends up happening to their votes is ultimately more important than whether ANO or STAN loses or gains a few percentage points.
First Vice Chair Tomáš Portlík of ODS, who is his party's candidate for Prague mayor, wants to get things done at city hall and would probably be best able to do this in a grand coalition with ANO. But the billionaires and other forces behind STAN, Praha sobě and the Pirates are putting pressure on him to shun ANO and to form another broad coalition after the Oct. elections. Portlík's response was to tell Deník that he doesn't want a coalition at Prague city hall with Andrej Babiš. Instead, Portlík started talking about an even broader coalition than the current one and about handpicking people from all the main parties, including ANO. But why would Babiš agree to this? He understands that the biggest threat to ANO are the people behind STAN, Praha sobě and the Pirates. The same in fact applies to ODS, but its leadership is slow to catch on to this. How it decides at Prague city hall will likely determine whether ODS is able to recapture the chief opposition role in the country or permanently cedes it to STAN.
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