The Tomio Okamura Phenomenon: When Populism Makes Truth Irrelevant

IESS spoke with Katerina Demetrashvili, Member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies from the Czech Pirate Party, about the political phenomenon of Tomio Okamura, the transformation of SPD from permanent opposition into a governing force, and the way populism, conspiracy narratives and the erosion of objective truth create an environment increasingly compatible with Russian information warfare.

You have lived in Czechia essentially your entire life. What brought you into politics?

I was initially much more interested in law. I chose my university very carefully, and that decision happened to coincide with the 2021 parliamentary elections, when the campaigns were extremely intense. At the time, there was a very strong anti-Babiš narrative: political forces had to unite above all to prevent Andrej Babiš from winning.

That had a significant influence on me. I started following the campaigns, and the Pirates and STAN programme appealed to me the most. I joined both youth organisations and, naturally, through conversations with people there, became increasingly involved in politics.

When the time came to put together candidate lists for parliament, friends started asking me: why don’t you try it yourself? I realised that I wanted to vote for young people and for women, while at the same time I was already a member of a political party. The very thing that had originally mobilised me politically was the idea that I could not simply complain; I had to do something myself.

Initially, that meant handing out leaflets in the street. Eventually, the same logic led me to run for office. I realised that I was exactly in the position where I would otherwise expect someone else to step forward. Since then, I have also gradually been overcoming the impostor syndrome, the feeling that perhaps I do not belong there.

The Czech parliament has a number of very distinctive political personalities. One of those most visible from Ukraine today is Tomio Okamura. How would you describe him, and why has his political phenomenon become visible beyond Czechia?

I would begin with a broader observation about the evolution of political parties. We often see very steep transformations. Many parties that later become associated with corruption, for example, originally emerge as anti-corruption movements. A similar kind of political ambivalence can be observed in the development of SPD.

When it was politically advantageous, Tomio Okamura himself was considerably more pro-European. Even on migration, there are older statements of his that were nowhere near as radical as his rhetoric today. He was capable of recognising certain economic advantages of integration and of incorporating migrant labour into the economy.

Over time, however, he evolved into what we see today, and this is clearly a form of populism.

There is also a broader international dimension. We increasingly see political parties copying models that have successfully captured political power abroad. The MAGA movement is an obvious example. Elements of Donald Trump’s political style can now also be seen directly in Andrej Babiš’s communication.

The underlying principle is that it gradually stops mattering who is lying because the very existence of an objective truth becomes disputable. A politician can say virtually anything and then challenge the legitimacy of journalists, oversight institutions or even courts that contradict him. Once anything can be questioned, it becomes much easier to promote almost any policy, regardless of how irrational it may be.

Okamura’s recent campaign against the Sudeten German meeting in Brno is a good example. For almost an entire week, Czech news was occupied by SPD’s attempt to push through a parliamentary resolution opposing the event. Such a resolution would have practically changed nothing. What makes the case particularly interesting is that Okamura himself had previously spoken about these issues much more normally.

So we are watching an evolution. Part of it is domestic political calculation, but part of it is clearly learning from successful political models abroad. AfD is certainly an important example here, and its transformation was even more rapid.

Why does this political model work?

Because this type of rhetoric is capable of mobilising regions and groups of people who often simply do not have enough time in their everyday lives to study political programmes and complicated policy questions in depth. A short slogan is enough.

It is very attractive when someone offers you a vision of the world in which there is one clearly identifiable enemy responsible for all of your problems. This is one of the reasons why aggressive anti-migration rhetoric has become so successful across Europe.

That does not mean Europe has no migration problem or that it should not be addressed. The irony is that the same parties that campaign most aggressively against migration also tend to oppose European cooperation, even though the European level is precisely where migration can be addressed most effectively.

There is an additional contradiction. These parties frequently oppose concrete measures simply because the word “migration” appears in their title. The EU Migration Pact, for example, contains some of the strongest measures developed at the European level for controlling and limiting illegal migration, yet the same political forces oppose it even where its provisions correspond to their declared objectives.

This demonstrates how strongly their voters respond to political personality rather than policy substance.

We also encounter supporters of these movements who are otherwise capable, intelligent and highly competent people, yet have somehow fallen into a worldview composed almost entirely of alternative conspiracy theories. It is often fascinating to observe.

What kinds of conspiracy narratives are particularly important in this environment?

One example is the idea that migration waves directed toward Europe are deliberately designed to change the composition of European societies.

This connects to a much broader phenomenon. We saw similar mechanisms in the United States, where Donald Trump rose politically in an environment saturated with narratives about elites controlling society and operating behind closed doors. The Epstein case subsequently complicated the situation further because elements of broader public suspicion toward elites appeared to receive confirmation.

That makes separating legitimate criticism from conspiracy thinking considerably more difficult.

What is distinctive about Okamura’s own campaigning?

Besides being a populist, he very rarely builds his communication around a complete argument. There may be a fragment of truth in what he says, but he then constructs the rest of the story around that fragment.

And that is precisely how some of the most effective disinformation campaigns work. You do not need everything to be false. In fact, it works better when a substantial part is true, because the audience then assumes that what follows must also be true.

There is another important characteristic of Okamura. For most of his political career, he was an opposition politician. He was always fighting against someone. He was always criticising. He rarely had to conduct active policy or defend decisions for which he himself was responsible.

Now that he is Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and has to defend the actions of the governing majority, you can see how uncomfortable that position is for him. He is much better at opposing something than explaining what his own political camp has actually done.

Being against everyone is comparatively easy when you do not expect to exercise power yourself.

Has entering institutional power exposed this contradiction?

I think so.

During the previous parliamentary term, SPD, and Okamura personally, focused heavily on Markéta Pekarová Adamová as Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies. They criticised things that are simply inherent to the position: symbolic diplomacy, receiving foreign representatives, official travel abroad or the use of an official car.

These things are politically easy to attack because you can always say that taxpayers are paying for someone to fly somewhere or drive an expensive car.

I expected that once Okamura himself entered exactly this position, some of his voters might be disappointed. He had spent years criticising Pekarová for driving a BMW, and now he himself uses a BMW.

But suddenly it does not matter.

That tells us something important about the relationship between the politician and his electorate. It is often extremely difficult to counter this political model through conventional argument because there is no consistent chain of reasoning or causality to challenge.

Okamura’s rhetoric remains remarkably repetitive: the SPD movement must constantly be mentioned, and almost every second sentence returns to the claim that “we want things for Czech citizens.”

There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that one of the country’s most prominent faces of anti-migration politics is himself of Japanese origin. Yet he can simultaneously present himself as a Moravian. For me, this illustrates some of the contradictions inherent in this political identity.

Where does this style of politics ultimately lead?

It affects much more than individual elections. It changes the way society understands truth itself.

People exposed to this style of political argument can gradually reach the conclusion that objective truth does not exist, or at least that there is no point in trying to establish it.

And this is precisely one of the most effective mechanisms used by contemporary Russian propaganda.

Russian propaganda becomes much more difficult to identify when it is not simply saying: “Ukrainians are bad, Russians are good.” The more effective approach is to flood the information environment with competing narratives, partial truths, suspicions and contradictions.

If the narratives most useful to you contain enough truth to appear credible, people can easily become lost in the information environment. Eventually, some adopt a much more convenient conclusion: there is no point in following politics at all because nothing can be influenced, elites decide everything anyway, and ordinary citizens are powerless.

That is an extremely effective narrative, particularly among people whose living conditions leave them little time or energy for detailed political discussion. If they no longer see the connection between their own wellbeing, political decisions and their vote, democratic participation itself begins to lose meaning.

So the objective does not necessarily have to be convincing people of one particular falsehood?

Exactly. You do not necessarily need to make everyone believe one lie.

It can be enough to destroy their confidence that the truth can be established at all.

Once people accept that everything is manipulation, that everyone lies and that nothing can be influenced, they become much easier to mobilise through identity, anger and simple slogans.

And at that point, political communication no longer needs to be internally consistent. The politician can condemn something when in opposition and do essentially the same thing once in power without necessarily losing the loyalty of his electorate.

That is what makes this phenomenon particularly important.

Has SPD’s entry into government changed the way Czech institutions approach the movement?

There is one development that I find particularly interesting. Every year, the Czech government publishes a report on extremism and prejudicial hatred. SPD had repeatedly appeared in these reports in previous years.

This year, however, the movement was absent from the report. According to information reported by Czech media, SPD had appeared in an earlier expert version of the document but was no longer present in the final version. This happened after SPD had moved from permanent opposition into the governing political environment.

That is particularly important because SPD’s rhetoric itself has remained controversial. In June 2026, a Prague court imposed a CZK 3 million fine on the movement over its election campaign posters, finding SPD guilty of incitement to hatred. The judgment was not final. Proceedings concerning Tomio Okamura personally were separated after the Chamber of Deputies declined to lift his parliamentary immunity.

At the same time, the institutional picture is not entirely straightforward. A Prague district court also ruled in June 2026 that the Interior Ministry had violated SPD’s rights by including the movement in its 2022 extremism report. That decision was also reported as non-final. So the point is not that SPD has somehow been legally established as an “extremist party.” The reality is more complicated, and the way Czech institutions classify the movement has itself become the subject of legal and political dispute.

What I find significant is the timing. A movement repeatedly discussed by state institutions in the context of extremism and prejudicial hatred enters the governing political environment, and suddenly it disappears from the latest report.

If the expert draft did indeed contain SPD, as Czech reporting indicates, while the final version did not, then the question is no longer only whether SPD has changed after entering power.

The more interesting question is whether the institutions around SPD have begun changing the way they describe it.

And that would represent a very different stage of political normalisation.