Far Ahead the Business Firm Party: How to Cope with Andrej Babiš´ ANO 2011

Business-firm party (Hopkin and Paolucci 1999), personal party (Calise 2015), entrepreneurial party (Hloušek, Kopeček and Vodová 2020): political science offers a wide range of concepts to define party formations that have emerged over recent decades across diverse national contexts and under markedly different leadership profiles. The Czech case of Andrej Babiš’s ANO 2011 (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens, ANO) has been analysed through many of these lenses (for instance see T. Cirhan 2023). Yet its dynamic evolution arguably exceeds the explanatory capacity of existing theoretical frameworks, even when these are adapted. Initially emerging as a right-wing populist movement opposing the political establishment and promoting the idea of the state being run like a firm, ANO 2011 transformed within a few years into a party championing pensioners’ interests and pursuing overtly clientelist policies. In doing so, it significantly undermined the two traditionally dominant left-wing parties in the Czech Republic: the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. Subsequently, ANO 2011 continued to be labelled populist while also presenting itself as an anti-establishment liberal force, notably through its membership in the Renew Europe group. More recently, however, the party has shifted again towards the radical right, joining Patriots for Europe and winning the Czech general elections before becoming the leading force in a new (extreme) right-wing coalition in late 2025. During this period, Andrej Babiš also ran in the presidential election, demonstrating the extent of political personalisation in contemporary Czech politics. Although unsuccessful, this campaign exposed both the strengths and the limits of Babiš’s political image and leadership capacities. What stands out most clearly is ANO 2011’s remarkable ability to operate as a political chameleon. This level of ideological and strategic adaptability was largely absent from early formulations of the business-firm party model, including paradigmatic cases such as Forza Italia, and is only partially captured by other existing concepts. While ANO 2011 can still be classified as a populist party, it is now less overtly anti-establishment and increasingly characterised by contradictory policy positions and blurred ideological placement, which remains highly contingent and subject to change. This paper aims to address whether ANO 2011 can be meaningfully accommodated within established conceptual categories, or if it defies them. It proposes a comprehensive analysis of the party’s organisational structure, the evolution of its programmatic positions, changes within its leadership team over time, and, crucially, the central role of Andrej Babiš—his positions, interests, and strategic objectives—in shaping the party’s trajectory. The ability to change practically everything in order to preserve the electoral dominance (and the one-man leadership) should be a new model for party politics and broadly question democracy itself.