Andrej Babiš

Andrej Babiš (born September 2, 1954, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia [now in Slovakia]) is a Czech politician and businessman. He was the prime minister of the Czech Republic from 2017–21 and began a second term in 2025.

Early life

Babiš was born in Bratislava, in what was then Czechoslovakia but is now the capital of Slovakia. His father was a trade representative and a member of the ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Babiš spent much of his childhood abroad, attending elementary school in Paris and high school in Geneva. By his own account he made money in his youth by working various jobs, including delivering milk and building weekend houses, starting at the age of 15. He went on to earn an economics degree. From 1985 to 1991 Babiš worked in Morocco as a sales representative.

From business to politics

During the decade after the fall of communism in eastern Europe, Babiš was a cofounder and director of the agricultural and chemical company Agrofert and became its owner in 1995. Today Agrofert is a massive conglomerate and the largest Czech private employer; it comprises more than 200 companies in fields including agriculture, plastic production, food processing, and fuel, with companies throughout central Europe. At the beginning of 2026 Babiš’s net worth was estimated at $4.4 billion. His sprawling business holdings have led to allegations of conflicts of interest.

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In 2011 Babiš established the populist ANO party; its acronym means “yes” in Czech and stands for Action for Dissatisfied Citizens. Tapping into voters’ frustration with corruption, the party promised to clean up politics. ANO took second place in a parliamentary election in 2013, and Babiš became finance minister the following year, serving until 2017. In the October 2017 elections, Babiš’s party won nearly 30 percent of the vote, despite Babiš being charged earlier that month with fraud. That vote ended a generation of political control by the country’s traditional parties.

As prime minister, Babiš led a cabinet that was center-left, despite having been compared to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump; Babiš even declared in 2019 that he wanted “to make the Czech Republic great again.” But that same year more than 200,000 people participated in a protest rally demanding that Babiš resign over his business dealings, after a European Commission audit found that his roles as a businessman and politician posed a conflict of interest. In 2021 his party lost a close election to a liberal-conservative three-party coalition after Babiš ran a campaign that attacked the European Union (EU) and promised to stem illegal immigration.

Babiš staged a comeback in 2025, when his party won parliamentary elections that ousted the center-right, pro-Western government led by Prime Minister Petr Fiala. Babiš pushed back on critics who said that he would not be supportive of the EU and NATO, telling reporters after his victory, “We want to save Europe…and we are clearly pro-European and pro-NATO.” Notably, in 2024 Babiš and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had teamed up to form the “Patriots for Europe” alliance in the European Parliament to represent far-right groups. During the 2025 campaign Babiš promised lower taxes and faster growth—a convincing message to Czechs who had suffered from high inflation and reduced real income. He also argued that the government had spent too much on the war in Ukraine. Babiš took office as prime minister once again in December 2025, when his ANO party joined forces with the immigration restrictionist Freedom and Direct Democracy party and the right-wing Motorists for Themselves (a party that promotes car ownership and opposes green policies) to form a coalition government.