The Story of a Strange Marriage: The Way of ANO to ALDE

The paper deals with the engagement of the Czech entrepreneurial party ANO of Andrej Babiš vis-à-vis the federation of liberal parties at the EU level as well as the ALDE group in the European Parliament. Contrary to the established parties that selected membership in the party federations already in the 1990s because of belonging to the same party family (Communists, Socialists, or Christian Democrats) or later on because of their stances to the project of European integration (Civic Democrats shifting from EPP-ED faction to ECR in 2009), the ANO´s choice was influenced by broader set of reasons. The goal of our analysis is to reconstruct the decision made by Babiš´s party pertaining the cooperation at the EU level and to discuss to what extent this decision has so far led to any deeper Europeanization of the party. Combination of a process tracing and analysis of the stances and policies of Andrej Babiš and the ANO will allow us to delimit the reasons as well as impact of the preferred patterns of cooperation at the EU level.