Babiš and Bertie: Why Fianna Fáil Didn’t Follow Their Czech Counterparts into Populism

Prague’s Populist Paladin

The boom could be back in Prague with Czech voters opting to return neoliberal businessman turned populist kingpin Andrej Babiš to power despite desultory claims of Russian interference.

A Slovak who made his fortune creating the agri-chemical giant Agrofert, having thrived on a combination of EU subsidies and market liberalisation, Babiš now seeks to differentiate himself from the set path of European integrationism.

Since 2013, and particularly after 2017, Czech politics have been dominated by the billionaire businessman presenting himself as an outsider figure, and who leveraged his control over Czechia’s media ecosystem to create his hegemonic ANO party.

Benefitting from the fading of traditional centre-right and social democratic parties until recently, Babiš rubbed shoulders with Fianna Fáil through the Eurofederalist ideological faction of Renew in the EU Parliament.

Breaking with Fianna Fáil and Renew last year, Babiš forged a new alliance with Le Pen and Hungary’s FIdesz following an embrace of nativist, anti-green, and socially conservative talking points.

Cynics opine that Babiš’ new ideological inclinations has as much to do with threats to his corporate holdings under new green measures from Brussels with ANO careful to stay within the pro-NATO fold despite critical rhetoric towards Ukraine.

For outsiders to know, post-communist Czech elites have long oscillated between hardline Atlanticists and Euro-realists as Babiš and the ANO altered their stance to fit the material interests of Czech industrial and agribusiness capital.

While the European Commission continues its rule of law crusade against Hungary insiders note that Babiš’s rightward shift challenges the EU’s normative liberalism not by breaking with it outright with Czech-Orbanism but by eroding it from within.

The Czech election result reflects not a break with globalism, but its mutation backed by segments of the state-capitalist elite, facilitated by a fragmented and conflicted intelligence service for which Prague is famous for second only to a mercurial Vienna.

ANO represents the nationalisation of Czech neoliberalism floating along in the geopolitical current of Central European illiberalism and Orbanist and now Trumpist takeover of the transatlantic architecture. This new course presents certain questions as to why Czechia, specifically Fianna Fáil didn’t follow despite some of the same populist DNA.

Managed Populism Versus Managed Decline

Tracing our steps back to recent history, Ireland absorbed neoliberal shock of 2008 through technocratic continuity and major influxes of American capital while Czechia experienced elite fragmentation manifesting itself through various scandals in the 2010s.

While Czechia re-oligarchised the past five years Ireland de-sovereigned through complete market integration with European and Americanisation the cornerstone being a lack of domestic security architecture, The post-Crash Irish state did not fall to oligarchy it absorbed itself into transnational capital, becoming a shell.

Whereas even the words ‘the Irish economy’ is a misnomer due to sheer economic comprador-ism, Czechia in comparison has a genuine domestic capitalist class represented by ANO that pushed politics in the direction of populism.

Ireland’s old bourgeoisie, Tony O’Reilly Sr., Tony Ryan, Smurfit , built national firms with global ambition.That class of capitalist is gone. Today, Ireland produces data managers and facilitators, not sovereign capitalists.

Unlike Czechia, Ireland won’t and can’t produce a Babiš. Why? Because it has no rooted economic class to seize political power and no political imagination (yet) to reclaim it.

The Soldiers of Destiny could not become populist because its historical alliance between petty bourgeois Ireland and developmental nationalism had already been subsumed into transnational capital. 

Fianna Fáil, post-crisis, no longer represents an active national bourgeoisie per the Haughey or even Bertie years as it wanders into irrelevance as it is gobbled up by localism at its roots.

While Czech populism defined itself against the bureaucratic monolith of the EU, Fianna Fáil’s networks were willfully absorbed into it. The Irish state after the Troika was not merely compliant with European norms, it was structurally dependent on them right down to its policy framing.

The old world Fianna Fáil populism, clientlist/ populist-republican, was if nothing else an idiom of a people still conscious of themselves as historical actors

Czechia shows what happens when national capitalism captures the state. Ireland shows what happens when national capitalism disappears entirely. One drifts into oligarchy. The other into managed globo-homo dusting the latest migrant stabbing under the rug

In this setting, Irish liberalism no longer competes for consent; it governs through management, framing disagreement as misinformation and ‘the foir right’. The result is a republican polity that feels pacified yet brittle, its sense of historical agency outsourced to the EU and America.

What vanished not just in Fianna Fail was not grassroots populism but the very belief that Ireland’s destiny could still be even argued about this side of the Belfast Agreement. The parallel Czech example reveals that such a vacuum is not a structural inevitability but a chosen posture: one born of elite one to which Dublin has jumped headlong into.

It goes without saying expect none of this in the post-Jim Gavin autopsy reported currently being aried by Dev House as the Martin leadership negotiates its own exit.