Auditioning for Orbán's Old Seat
Andrej Babiš isn't taking Czechia out of NATO, but building the ambiguity that makes formal membership beside the point
The Czech Republic will not elect a president again until January 2028, yet the fight over who might unseat Petr Pavel is already one of the defining lines in Czech politics. That is largely because Pavel is in open conflict with Prime Minister Andrej Babiš's coalition over his own right to attend NATO summits, a case now before the Constitutional Court that Pavel looks likely to win.
Framed as a personnel question, this looks unremarkable: governments often prefer a friendlier head of state. Framed honestly, it is something narrower and more telling. Since Babiš returned to power, the pressure has landed consistently on the presidency itself, and every name floated to replace Pavel keeps carrying a closeness to Moscow that would be disqualifying almost anywhere else in the EU.
The clearest way to read this is regional: Central Europe used to have an Orbán in the room, one leader willing to soften the bloc's line on Russia from the inside. Budapest, under Péter Magyar, has actually turned into one of Ukraine's steadier regional partners, and Slovakia's Robert Fico built his career as Orbán's junior partner rather than a leader in his own right.
That seat looks open, and Babiš is behaving like a man auditioning for it, under Prague's label instead of Budapest's.
Candidates say the quiet part
The clearest evidence is who keeps getting mentioned as Pavel's replacement. Former President Miloš Zeman, who spent much of his own time in office as one of the EU's most reliably pro-Kremlin voices, has publicly pushed ANO's deputy chair and former parliamentary speaker Radek Vondráček as the coalition's best bet. Vondráček's own record includes a strange, closed-door visit to Moscow in 2021, made without the usual Czech press pool, after which Russian outlets reported he had called resisting sanctions over Crimea a priority of Czech diplomacy, a claim never cleanly denied and one that earned him the "Russian lackey" label from opposition figures at the time.
His successor as speaker later auctioned off souvenirs from that same trip and sent the proceeds to Ukraine's military, a fairly pointed verdict from within his own institution.
Last year's parliamentary election already showed Czech voters punishing candidates seen as close to Russia, which is why attention has drifted toward an alternative: a non-political woman who could soften the coalition's image entirely. One name now circulating is Ivana Tykač, a charity founder and businesswoman married to coal billionaire Pavel Tykač, whose fortune sits in an industry openly hostile to the EU's Green Deal and who personally bankrolls the Václav Klaus Institute, a think tank that drifts comfortably into pro-Russian talking points under a euroskeptic banner.
Whichever name eventually sticks, the pattern is the same: candidates who are either openly Moscow-adjacent or financially tethered to people who are, marketed as continuity or as a fresh, apolitical face.
Ambiguity, not exit
None of this requires Czechia to leave NATO, and that is exactly the point. The Institute has previously described why the Kremlin's goal for the alliance's eastern members is not withdrawal but friction: an ally that remains formally inside NATO while arguing internally over who represents it at summits, drifting away from its own defense spending targets, softening its support for Ukraine, and sending allies two contradictory political signals from the same government at once.
A dispute over which Czech official gets to appear at a NATO summit sounds like a domestic protocol squabble. It is also a live, functioning example of exactly that fracturing logic, achieved through entirely legal, mundane political maneuvering rather than anything dramatic enough to trigger a unified response.
The court that held
Slovakia offers the region's clearest cautionary tale of what happens once the institutions meant to catch this kind of drift stop holding. After Fico returned to power in 2023, his coalition dissolved the Special Prosecutor's Office and the National Crime Agency, the two bodies that had handled the country's most serious corruption and organized-crime cases.
A referendum in July on scrapping Fico's own lifetime pension as a former long-serving prime minister, and on restoring those two agencies, failed only on turnout: just 16.13% of eligible voters showed up, short of the majority required, but of those who did vote, 93.43% wanted his pension gone. It was Slovakia's tenth referendum since independence, and only one, EU accession in 2004, has ever succeeded.
Fico's grip has not been broken, but the numbers say his domestic standing keeps eroding even as the checks that might have constrained him further have already been dismantled.
Czechia is showing the other half of that comparison: what it looks like while institutional resistance still functions. Pavel's Constitutional Court case is very likely to go his way, and the fact that a government under real pressure to sideline its president cannot simply do so by decree is not a small thing.
Slovakia shows what happens once that kind of resistance weakens.
Czechia, so far, is showing what happens while it still works.
That distinction may not last
Polling currently gives Pavel a clear edge over Babiš, in a first round and in a head-to-head runoff alike, and every public attack the coalition mounts against him appears to push his numbers up rather than down, which is very likely why Babiš personally has started sounding more conciliatory rather than less.
But popularity is not the same as protection, and the coalition's search for a successor has not slowed down just because its own preferred method of removing Pavel keeps making him more popular.
The real danger here was never a single constitutional crisis, but normalization of two Czech foreign policies running at once, one from the presidency and one from the government, each claiming to speak for the country at the same summits.
A divided foreign policy eventually produces a divided security policy, and divided security is precisely the vulnerability Russia has spent this entire war looking for on NATO's eastern flank.