On the heels of the right’s election victory in Austria follows another win for the anti-establishment, this time in the Czech Republic. With nearly all the votes counted, the billionaire Andrej Babis’ party ANO is set to become the winner with almost 30% of the votes.
The second largest party, clocking in at around 11% is the patriotic anti-immigration party SPD, which by some is described as the sister party of Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). These parties performed strongly in the recent German and Austrian elections respectively.
Just to make a perfect storm for the anti-establishment, the Pirate Party (Piráti) came in fourth at 10%. The center-right party STAN just barely made it above the parliamentary cutoff at 5%.
The social democrats had a disastrous election, mirroring the results for left-wing parties across Europe in the last election cycle. Although Babis’ ANO is considered centrist, in sum the election is a win for the right, but especially to those who are skeptical of the EU and third world immigration.
Czechxit?
A natural question to ask is whether we will see official moves towards leaving the EU – a Czechxit. Although there is much hostility towards the Merkel-lead open borders regime, an outright exit is highly unlikely at this point. The Czech Republic benefits too much from EU’s single market and will find it difficult to reject the substantial monetary transfers it receives from the more affluent EU members.
However, a far more likely outcome in the short run is a strengthening of the so-called Visegrád Group (V4) consisting of the four central European neighbor countries Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. All of these nations are firmly against third world immigration, especially from Muslim countries. And all of them have experienced a political shift towards the right.
Their political lockstep towards EU-skeptic anti-immigration makes it natural for them to start cooperating more closely to shift the EU in their direction. Even before this latest Czech election, we saw definite signs of the V4 flexing its muscles when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a Visegrád meeting in Budapest in July. An excerpt from an official statement by the group reads:
“They strongly and unequivocally condemned recent terrorist attacks, including those in Israel and across the world, and stressed that terrorism continues to be a troubling phenomenon of our times and represents a serious threat to international peace and security.
The leaders agreed to exchange views on their efforts aimed at fighting terrorism and countering violent extremism and incitement. The five leaders agreed to explore the possibility of further strengthening joint cooperation in the areas of defense and defense industry, cyber security, hybrid threats, non-proliferation and information and know-how sharing.”
Although innocuous in and of itself, this and other join statements by Israel and the V4 could be seen as a challenge to the EU elite. Notably, Netanyahu gave his support to Hungary in their condemnation of billionaire George Soros and his left-wing globalist meddling in his native Hungary.
With the recent election results, we should expect to see the Visegrád group strengthening its efforts to influence the future of the EU. Should those efforts be struck down by Merkel and her clique, however, there is a high possibility that we will see more concrete divorce plans emerge in this region.
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