Czechia’s Populist Return: Babiš, Coalition Hardliners and the European Union Friction Map

In December 2025, Czech politics entered a new phase of populist incumbency as President Petr Pavel appointed Andrej Babiš Prime Minister, returning the right-wing party ANO to power after four years in opposition. The October election outcome matters less as a routine alternation than as a governing reconfiguration: Babiš’ parliamentary arithmetic ties cabinet survival to partners whose political brand is built on confronting European Union (hereinafter: EU), thereby turning EU policy files into domestically profitable “cost and sovereignty” contests while maintaining formal commitments to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (hereinafter: NATO) membership and continued EU participation.

The first signals arrived quickly. In its initial cabinet session, the government rejected the EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact (set to take effect from June 2026) and opposed Emissions Trading System 2 (hereinafter: ETS2), the next-stage carbon pricing architecture expected to begin in 2028, arguing that both would increase household costs and undermine industrial competitiveness. What emerges is an early “friction agenda” likely to define Czechia’s European posture: assertive rhetoric, coalition-facing escalation and selective compliance shaped by EU legal authority and the distributional risks of enforcement.

Coalition Architecture and Incentives

Babiš’ return is best understood through the coalition constraints underpinning his majority. ANO governs alongside the radical-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (hereinafter: SPD) and the Motorists for Themselves Party, partners whose electoral identities are anchored in Eurosceptic confrontation, hostility to climate regulation and a more sceptical posture toward sustained support for Ukraine. From the outset, the executive therefore contains a built-in tension: a government that gains domestically from challenging EU, yet remains institutionally embedded in the Euro-Atlantic order and constrained by the presidency’s insistence on responsible NATO-EU stewardship. This matters because coalition maintenance reshapes what counts as “successful” policy. In cabinets held together by hardline partners, political payoff often comes less from slow, technical implementation than from visible and distributable signals, announcements of resistance, demands for opt-outs, renegotiation claims and “national interest” framing.

The early rejection of the Migration Pact and ETS2 is best read through this lens: both files can be narrated as immediate household-cost shocks and competitiveness threats even though their real-world effects are mediated by long timelines, regulatory complexity and the EU’s capacity to discipline defection. Yet escalation is not costless. EU governance equips the centre with an enforcement and funding toolkit that can convert non-compliance into infringement procedures, financial penalties and reputational costs that translate into domestic vulnerability. These constraints encourage a characteristic equilibrium of managed confrontation: maximalist rhetoric to satisfy coalition demands, paired with bargaining, delay tactics and selective implementation calibrated to keep sanctions risks below a politically damaging threshold.

A further twist makes this equilibrium easier to sustain in the migration domain: Czechia is exempt from solidarity payments in 2026 because it hosts around 400.000 Ukrainian refugees. This reduces immediate fiscal exposure while leaving migration politics highly salient and electorally mobilisable. The implication is straightforward: Czechia’s “EU friction map” is not incidental. It is a predictable output of coalition architecture in which EU-facing conflict functions as a governance resource that can be redeployed whenever domestic cohesion needs reinforcement.

The EU Friction Map

The opening targets chosen by the cabinet, the Migration and Asylum Pact and ETS2 are not arbitrary. They are high-salience, high-distribution EU files: easy to translate into household-cost and sovereignty language, difficult for voters to audit technically and sufficiently slow-moving to sustain confrontation without requiring immediate policy delivery. In short, they are ideal instruments for internationalising domestic price politics: oppose EU-facing rules that can be framed as raising living costs, then seek allies inside the EU to dilute, delay or revise the package.

On migration, the government’s stance signals a tougher line on returns and asylum governance and rejects a solidarity model that expects all member states to contribute either through relocations or financial/operational support to states under pressure. The Council’s early December 2025 agreement on the 2026 “solidarity pool” illustrates why the pact is easy to portray as “burden shifting”: 21.000 relocations or 420€ million in financial contributions, with the first annual cycle beginning on 12 June 2026. Crucially, timing and exemptions make opposition politically cost-effective. With 2026 solidarity payments waived due to the Ukrainian refugee burden, the government can maximise domestic mobilisation against “forced solidarity” while facing reduced short-term fiscal exposure, symbolic contestation with limited immediate material cost. Still, a hard “no” posture collides with the EU’s enforcement reality, making outright refusal less plausible than a managed-confrontation approach: public rejection combined with bargaining and selective implementation designed to avoid economically painful penalties.

ETS2 offers an even more direct cost-mobilisation opportunity because it targets domains that households experience daily. In the EU’s evolving carbon-market architecture, ETS2 extends emissions pricing to buildings and road transport via upstream fuel suppliers, with politically sensitive timelines and built-in delay mechanisms. Under the current design, ETS2 becomes operational in 2027, with the possibility of postponement to 2028 under high energy-price conditions; monitoring and reporting obligations begin earlier. Against this background, Czechia’s rejection functions as an anticipatory framing battle: the government positions itself as the defender of households and industry, warns about competitiveness against global rivals and signals an intention to build an intra-EU blocking or revision coalition. The “friction map” logic is thus clear. Migration and ETS2 provide recurring, media-friendly conflict points that (i) hold coalition partners together, (ii) keep the government on a permanent “defender of households” footing and (iii) enable transactional bargaining inside the EU.

The Nuclear File as a Second Front

If migration and ETS2 constitute mass-politics friction points, the nuclear file is a high-stakes test of sovereign capacity and potentially the most consequential arena in which Czechia’s relationship with the EU could harden into a durable say-do conflict. The focal point is the expansion of the Dukovany nuclear power plant: a strategic infrastructure project reported at around 18$ billion for two new units, awarded to South Korea’s Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (hereinafter: KHNP) and contested by France’s Électricité de France (hereinafter: EDF). The tender has already generated an unusually dense litigation and governance trail, illustrating how “technical” infrastructure decisions become politicised and Europeanised.

In April 2025, the Czech Office for the Protection of Competition (hereinafter: ÚOHS) rejected EDF’s appeals, clearing the path toward contract signing with KHNP. In early May 2025, however, a Czech court ordered a last-minute halt after EDF challenged the ÚOHS decision, arguing that signing would irreversibly foreclose its chance to win the tender; the contract was paused pending resolution. The state’s response underscores the project’s strategic priority: the government took an 80% stake in Dukovany Nuclear Power Station (hereinafter: EDU II), the Czech Energy Plants (hereinafter: ČEZ) subsidiary responsible for reactor construction, an institutional move that effectively nationalises the delivery vehicle and increases executive control over financing, scheduling and risk allocation. When the injunction was later lifted, the authorities proceeded to sign, signalling that political commitment to nuclear expansion remained intact despite procedural turbulence.

For the new cabinet, Dukovany matters for two reasons. First, nuclear expansion is a credible platform to claim competence on energy security and medium-term price stability, core themes in a domestic agenda defined by cost-of-living politics. Second, it opens a second front in Czechia’s EU friction map because the legal battleground does not end with the national procurement review. EDF’s challenge travelled into the EU’s regulatory space through the Foreign Subsidy Regulation and state-aid scrutiny, raising the prospect that EU-level review could reshape financing structures, risk distribution between state and contractor and project timelines. The key point is not whether the EU ultimately blocks the project; it is that prolonged EU scrutiny can produce real fiscal exposure and credibility costs for a government that frames nuclear delivery as an answer to energy affordability.

Here, coalition incentives become decisive. A cabinet that draws domestic cohesion from confronting the EU may be tempted to politicise Commission scrutiny as proof that “Europe prevents Czech solutions.” Yet that strategy carries a self-defeating risk: the longer uncertainty persists, the higher the probability of cost inflation, timeline slippage and loss of delivery credibility, precisely the outcomes that undercut competence claims in a price-politics environment. Unlike migration and ETS2, where delay can be politically useful, nuclear delivery is a hard-implementation domain: contracts must be executed, financing must close and construction milestones must be met. This is why the nuclear file can outweigh the other disputes in practical consequence.

Ukraine, NATO and Regional Repositioning

Babiš’ return does not amount to a formal strategic reorientation away from NATO and the EU; it is better read as a shift from leadership-through-commitment to transactional alignment under domestic constraint. President Pavel’s appointment of the cabinet was accompanied by an explicit call for responsible NATO-EU stewardship, reinforcing that Czech strategic anchoring is not fundamentally in question even as coalition incentives pull toward confrontation. The most immediate sign of change appears in Ukraine policy. Babiš signalled an intention to reduce military aid and questioned the Czech-led international ammunition-sourcing initiative, criticising transparency and pricing.

Yet this file also illustrates how retrenchment can be pursued without a clean break. A feasible compromise aligns with the government’s broader governing logic: reduce direct national spending and political ownership while allowing an internationally financed mechanism to continue in order to avoid reputational fallout inside NATO and among key partners. The coalition context sets the boundary conditions. The core constraint is not membership but posture and burden: how much Czechia contributes, on what terms, and with what rhetorical framing. Regionally, the early pattern points toward a more coordinated Central and Eastern European bargaining style, less about formal Visegrad 4 solidarity and more about issue-by-issue alignment on EU obligations tied to Ukraine financing and regulatory politics.

Czechia appears to be moving toward a pragmatic hybrid: it retains NATO-EU anchoring, avoids maximal breaches, but increasingly treats Ukraine-related commitments and security signalling as bargaining chips, mirroring the approach to migration and ETS2 through hard rhetoric, selective commitments and a preference to shift costs onto collective mechanisms.

Concluding Forecast

Babiš’ second incumbency is likely to operate as a governing equilibrium rather than a single policy turn. Czechia remains anchored in NATO and the EU, while the cabinet uses selected EU files as instruments of coalition management and distributive politics. The early rejection of the Migration Pact and ETS2 already establishes the operating logic: translate complex EU governance into a simple domestic frame of household costs, competitiveness and control, then search for intra-EU allies to dilute or delay implementation. Three trajectories are most plausible.

• Managed Confrontation (most likely): Czechia sustains tough rhetoric on migration and climate regulation to satisfy coalition hardliners, but avoids economically costly breaches through bargaining, delay and selective compliance calibrated against the EU’s enforcement capacity.
• Energy Escalation (high impact): the Dukovany expansion becomes the decisive second front where EU-level constraints and domestic sovereignty narratives collide. Because nuclear delivery is a hard-implementation domain, prolonged contestation is more likely to translate into timeline slippage and fiscal exposure, testing competence claims in the most visible way.
• Coalition Stress and Policy Incoherence (non-trivial risk): cabinet survival depends on partners rewarded by EU confrontation and Ukraine scepticism, while the presidency and external commitments impose a discipline that limits outright defection. This creates recurring incentives for symbolic escalation that may intermittently outrun the state’s room for manoeuvre. A “do less, but do not break anchoring” approach can stabilise the government in the short run, but it also embeds ambiguity and intra-executive tension as a persistent feature of Czech foreign and European policy.