Large protests have taken place in Prague to oppose the appointment of Filip Turek as minister of the environment. Jan Rovny writes that Czech President Petr Pavel’s unflinching position combined with organised civic mobilisation have shown how liberal democracy can prevail against illiberalism.
In the last week, the Czech Republic has witnessed an intense political impasse between the president and the government that brought a hundred thousand people to the streets of Prague.
These events centred around an attempt to nominate a questionable politician to a ministerial post. They incarnated the typical political chasm between illiberals unscrupulously seeking political dominance and defenders of a liberal democratic order – a divide that exists in dozens of permutations across developed democracies today. But what is particularly notable about the events in Prague is they show how liberal democrats can prevail.
What happened?
The crux of the dispute lies in Czech Republic president Petr Pavel’s refusal to nominate Filip Turek, the honorary chairman of the Motorists party – a junior member of the governing coalition – as minister of the environment.
Turek, a businessman and car racer, is known for selling alternative COVID-19 medication, collecting Third Reich memorabilia and trivialising Nazism, as well as for a long list of offensive comments. The president argued Turek’s stated views and actions were incompatible with the fundamental principles of the constitution and the legal order of the Czech Republic.
The dispute escalated when the leader of Turek’s Motorists, foreign minister Petr Macinka, criticised president Pavel and suggested he and his party would cut all communication with the presidency, constraining the president’s ability to participate in foreign policy activities.
After an outcry by the opposition, the civic organisation “Million moments for democracy” reacted by calling a demonstration in support of president Pavel, and against Macinka’s political blackmail, which brought some hundred thousand people to the streets of Prague’s old town.
Shortly after, president Pavel met with prime minister Babiš, who – sensitive to public opinion – accepted the president’s stance and called for a new ministerial nomination, effectively sidelining the Motorists and foreign minister Macinka.
What is the context?
Like so many democracies today, the Czech Republic is balancing a chasm between illiberal political forces questioning the benefits of liberal democracy, international cooperation and European integration on the one side, and a liberal camp convinced of the irreplaceability of the liberal democratic order rooted in the rule of law and protection of human rights and civil liberties.
After the 2025 legislative elections, a new Czech government made up of three disparate illiberal parties took power. However, president Petr Pavel, a retired army general who defeated Andrej Babiš in the 2023 presidential election, stands as an important constitutional corrective.
But the government is a marriage of convenience that is already a headache for prime minister Babiš. As I have argued previously, his electoral success may yet prove to be a pyrrhic victory. The three governing parties share an illiberal critique of the status quo but differ in important ways.
The leading government party, ANO, a technocratic outfit of the billionaire prime minister, Andrej Babiš, is organised to opportunistically further the business interests of its leader. Given Babiš’s various legal entanglements, ANO’s current role is to ensure that Babiš maintains his parliamentary immunity. Their illiberalism is thus primarily strategic.
Their selective critique of Europe, allusions to illegal migration or opposition to climate regulation mix with social support for specific segments of the population. This tame illiberalism galvanises ANO’s electoral support among less educated, rural voters, without directly offending Babiš’s western European business interests, his European contacts (which include president Macron) and his business model profiting from state and EU subsidies.
The second governing party, the radical right SPD, is more dogmatically focused on opposition to migration, to internationalism, especially the EU which it wants to leave, and increasingly also to Czech support for Ukraine. Their leader, Tomio Okamura, newly designated as speaker of the lower chamber of parliament, calls for prioritising Czech citizens above all.
His new year speech, decrying Czech initiatives to support Ukraine, labelling the Ukrainian government a “junta around Zelensky” and stating that the EU is heading towards “world war three”, was an embarrassment for the government. The SPD combines its nativist appeals with targeted social support of disadvantaged groups in areas such as pensions, access to affordable housing and controls of cost of living.
The Motorists are the third governing entity. Founded by a group of disaffected right-wing conservatives, they combine libertarian economic stances with masculinist traditionalism. They love large combustion engines and low taxes. The latter, however, places them at potential odds with their coalition partners whose nativist social policies require higher levels of spending.
The Czech party system
Figure 1, based on research by the Chapel Hill Expert Survey team, outlines the positions of Czech governing (triangles) and opposition parties (circles) on support for liberal democracy (y-axis) and left-right economic placement (x-axis). It highlights how the Czech political space is relatively condensed on economic issues, yet more dispersed on democracy.
While opposition parties squarely favour the liberal democratic constitutional arrangements of the country (many of their leaders spoke up in support of president Pavel), the three government parties stand on the illiberal side of the spectrum – with the Motorists in the illiberal lead (note that this data was collected in early 2025, before the recent elections).
Figure 1: Support for liberal democracy and economic positions of Czech parliamentary parties
Source: Chapel Hill Expert Survey
The figure further highlights the government’s split over economic issues. While ANO and the SPD stand at the left-wing edge of the Czech political space, the Motorists – oscillating between economic libertarianism and cultural authoritarianism – are among the most right-wing.
The fragility of this governing coalition split between profit-seeking businessmen, nativist radicals and Nazi-fetishising misfits, as well as over core economic priorities, led prime minister Babiš to downplay the political impasse with the presidency and seek a political reset.
How liberal democracy can win
The recent events in Prague are a minor scene in the drama of democratic struggles that play out in most developed democracies today. The last week, however, highlights how democracy can protect itself from unscrupulous attempts at illiberal norm-bending. The unflinching, constitutionally guided position of counter-veiling political forces, combined with organised civic mobilisation, left the illiberal challengers on the sidelines.
President Pavel stayed his course throughout the nomination conflict, while making it clear that he would only cede if ordered to do so by the constitutional court. His clear argumentation, explicitly referencing the constitution and constitutional jurisprudence, made a retort difficult for the amateurish Motorists.
Simultaneously, the civic organisation “Million moments for democracy”, now a veteran group that led massive protests against Babiš in 2019, has developed an effective organisation and maintains an extensive following across the country. This enabled them to mobilise a hundred thousand protesters at a key moment, providing popular backing for the president and forcing the prime minister’s hand.
This is certainly not the last act of this democratic drama, but an act that should be studied by all politicians and citizens who still believe that liberal democracy – the separation of political powers and the protection of individual rights and liberties – is better than the available alternatives.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Jan Hospodka provided by Shutterstock.
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