# Babis's ANO wins Czech election but coalition talks loom
*Event date: 2025-10-04*
Billionaire businessman Andrej Babis won the Czech parliamentary election on the event date, but his ANO movement fell short of an overall majority and now has to bargain for partners. The BBC report says ANO took just under 35% of the vote and 80 seats in the 200-seat lower house, up from 72 seats four years earlier. That leaves Babis ahead, but not in control.
The result puts coalition arithmetic at the center of Czech politics. Babis is expected to be invited to open talks on forming a new government, and the BBC says he has already begun discussions with two smaller right-wing eurosceptic parties that cleared the 5% threshold: the anti-Green Deal Motorists for Themselves and the anti-immigrant Freedom and Direct Democracy party, known as SPD. Yet the numbers are awkward. Babis told supporters he wanted ANO to govern alone rather than build a formal coalition, but the report makes clear that he will need both partners, because no other parties are likely to join him.
The policy bargains could be significant. ANO has common ground with the Motorists on climate and energy policy, especially skepticism toward EU emissions targets, resistance to higher costs for cleaner energy, and opposition to the EU ban on new petrol and diesel cars after 2035. The alliance with SPD is more complicated. SPD has pushed for a referendum on EU and NATO membership, a demand Babis has ruled out, and its calls to deport Ukrainian refugees are unlikely to carry much weight in his camp.
The report also points to a likely shift in Prague's support for Ukraine. Babis has promised to scrap the Czech ammunition initiative that has delivered millions of shells to Kyiv since 2022 and to move it under NATO's umbrella instead. He complains that the current system lacks transparency, while officials behind it say the secrecy is exactly what makes it work. Babis says he has no problem talking to President Volodymyr Zelensky about the issue, but the stance suggests a different tone on aid than the one associated with the outgoing government.
Babis's comments after the result were combative and confident. He celebrated what he called a historic success and said he wanted to make the Czech Republic the best place to live in the European Union. The BBC report says he also dismissed concerns among Western allies that his government would become less reliable, pointing instead to his record in office and his contacts with Donald Trump, the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA during his previous premiership. The question now is whether those claims of reliability can survive the harder math of coalition politics.
