Dealing with ‘centrist populists’: A case study of Czech Social Democrat responses to Andrej Babiš’s ANO movement 2011-2021

Research on democratic disruption in Europe has increasingly expanded from studying democratic backsliding to considering forms of democratic resilience and anti-populist pushback: civic mobilisation and the robustness of institutions, but mainstream parties’ reaction to populist challengers and populist erosion of democracy (Guasti 2020; Boese at al 2021; Luhrmann 2021). Such autocratisation-oriented approaches often stress the formation of broad mainstream coalitions capable of winning critical elections (Kaltwasser 2017; Eisen et al. 2019, 12–25; Grahn, Lührmann, and Gastaldi 2020), but also incorporate typologies of mainstream responses, which view the populist-mainstream dynamic in terms of programmatic competition in changing, but stable democratic systems (Bale et al. 2010; Mudde 2019; Abou-Chadi and Wagner 2019; 2020; Spoon and Klüver 2020). Much such literature leans on assumptions drawn from Western European contexts: 1) that populist challengers are – or originate on - the illiberal right and 2) that there is a clear, if declining, core of established mainstream parties. These transfer imperfectly to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) where populist challengers are both ‘centrist’ or ‘technocratic’ and culturally illiberal forms (Stanley 2017; Bustíková and Guasti 2019); and mainstream parties poorly institutionalised imitations of West European models sooner or later swept away by voter frustration with corruption and policy failure (Pop-Eleches 2010; Haughton and Krause 2020). This may skew the strategic responses available to mainstream parties - and add complexity and uncertainty to the strategic environment: centrist populists’ programmatic vagueness, lack of traditional ideological radicalism, and ability to make huge overnight electoral breakthroughs, for example, may rule out traditional cordon sanitaire strategies and obscure the illiberal implications of their gaining office. This paper explores these issues through a case study of the Czech Social Democrats’ (ČSSD) relationship with - and understanding of-the populist ANO movement of billionaire businessman Andrej Babiš. The paper first tracks the two parties’ relationship in the period 2011-2021 against the background of rising populism (and anti-populism) (Havlík 2012; 2019); broader democratic deterioration (Hanley and Vachudova 2018; Guasti 2018; 2020); and ČSSD’s steady decline from major party of government to minor and, ultimately, extra-parliamentary status; and relates ČSSD responses – and debates– to comparative typologies of anti-populist response. The paper considers Czech social democrats’ varied framings of ANO and political learning processes as revealed in published contributions by party representatives. These suggest that social democrats failed to grasp the dynamism, novelty, and adaptability of Babiš’s movement, misperceiving it either as a form of conventional right-wing pro-market politics or an ephemeral phenomenon which would rapidly collapse; and that contradictions in the party’s strategy were exacerbated by an inability to reconcile views of ANO as political competitor and as anti-system party threatening the democratic order (Klíma and Medilow 2016). The conclusions discuss how existing frameworks might be adjusted for contexts marked by ‘centrist’ rather than radical populism and whether studies of contemporary CEE democratic decline may benefit from more incorporation of ideational frames of the type undertaken in studies of historical patterns of democratic resilience (Berman 1998; Capoccia 2007; Ziblatt and Capoccia 2010).