Babiš has become Czech prime minister after promising to reduce military aid to Ukraine

Czech President Petr Pavel has appointed the head of the ANO movement (“Action of Dissatisfied Citizens”), businessman and billionaire Andrej Babiš, as the new prime minister.

This was reported by Czech media.

In October, Babiš stated that if he came to power, no more budget funds would be allocated for weapons for Ukraine.

“If we’re in the government, we’ll say to Czech arms factories: you want to export weapons to Ukraine? We have no problem with that. We won’t give a single crown from the budget to Ukraine for weapons. We have no money for the Czech Republic. I think we helped Ukraine directly, and from now on support will be provided through the EU,” he said at the time.

According to the Czech press, the new cabinet will be formed by parties including ANO, which will hold most of the posts, as well as the far-right “Freedom and Direct Democracy” (SPD) and the right-populist “Motorists Themselves” party. Czech President Petr Pavel must appoint candidates for ministerial posts within a week.

From 2017 to 2021, Babiš had already headed the Czech government, and for the past four years he has been in opposition to the pro-European and pro-Ukrainian government of Petr Fiala. The 71-year-old politician’s fortune is estimated at $4.3 billion. He owns Agrofert, the country’s leading agricultural producer, and the media group MAFRA, which publishes the newspapers Metro, Mladá fronta Dnes and Lidové noviny.

Babiš’s political force won the elections in early October. At the time, media outlets wrote about what this could mean for Ukraine.

A month after the election, the new speaker of the Czech Parliament, Tomio Okamura, on his very first day in office ordered the Ukrainian flag removed from the parliament building.