The debate over Andrej Babiš’s collaboration with the communist secret police
Main Czech opposition leader Andrej Babiš says he has been cleared and has never worked for communist secret police. Not true! Says PM Petr Fiala.
When Andrej Babiš, born in Slovakia, a former member of the Communist Party and later a billionaire businessman, decided to enter Czech politics in 2011, his communist past became an issue. According to documents from the National Memory Institute in Slovakia, Babiš allegedly collaborated with the State Security Police (StB) of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic under the code name "Agent Bureš." He immediately sued the Institute, and after several court rulings and appeals, the case eventually reached the Slovak Constitutional Court. Lawyer and journalist Tomáš Němeček, who follows the case, explains what happened next:
"The Constitutional Court ruled that Andrej Babiš had filed the wrong lawsuit; he should not have sued the National Memory Institute, which is the Slovak equivalent of the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. More importantly, the court questioned the credibility of the state security personnel involved, the real actors of the criminal regime. Instead, the court sided with historical analyses showing that the records were consistent, repeated across eight files, and matched other historical facts. So, when the new round began, with Andrej Babiš now suing the Ministry of the Interior directly, the National Memory Institute was confident that the state would win, bolstered by the Constitutional Court’s ruling."
However, that did not happen. The current Slovak government, led by Robert Fico, is openly closer to Babiš and his opposition ANO Party. The Ministry of the Interior decided not to pursue the court case, and a settlement was reached between the ministry and Babiš regarding his wrongful registration in the StB files. Slovak Minister of the Interior Matúš Šutaj Eštok explained:
"In my professional life, I make decisions based on evidence, facts, and the law. In this case, my political stance has absolutely nothing to do with it. One of the reasons we came to the conclusion to settle, based on the analyses, was because there was material hardship in this case. The analysis also recommended that we settle to avoid economic damages."
After some 12 years of court battles over this issue, Andrej Babiš claims he has always known he would be cleared. However, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala says that the decision of the Slovak Ministry does not, by any means, clear his main political opponent in his eyes:
"Instead of a court ruling, there was an agreement between Andrej Babiš’s lawyers and the Slovak Ministry of the Interior, which is essentially a political agreement. In my opinion, this cannot replace a court decision. If I recall correctly, though I haven’t followed the case in detail, Babiš’s past is clear and well-known to me. He was a man who, from a young age, enjoyed immense privileges that others in the communist system did not have. He was a Communist, studied abroad, and had opportunities normal people didn’t. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and that remains true to this day. So, there’s no need to comment further on that. Nevertheless, I have noted that the Slovak National Memory Institute still lists him as an agent because his deal with the Ministry of the Interior doesn’t change that. So, this is clearly a political deal. What else could it be?"
Despite this controversy, the question of whether Andrej Babiš was or was not a collaborator with the communist secret police does not seem to bother his many voters. With less than a year before the next general election, his ANO Party is the uncontested leader in the polls, with around a third of voters supporting it—more than twice the level of support for Prime Minister Fiala’s Civic Democratic Party.
