Thirteen out of thirteen: Babiš's party suffered a defeat as big as a barn door

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš's ANO movement failed to win a single seat in the second round of the Czech Senate elections, held on Friday and Saturday. A third of the 81-seat upper house, 27 seats, was up for renewal, and although ANO fielded candidates in 24 constituencies, thirteen of whom made it to the second round, all of them lost to opposition or local candidates. The party even lost its only seat among the 27 contested this time, so its Senate caucus shrank from 15 to 14 members. “For the ANO movement, this result is a catastrophe,” Babiš said, adding that they had not expected to come away empty-handed. He blamed the defeat on the party's regional organizations and also suggested that some candidates had relied too heavily on the party's name. He added that the government's strategy would not change, and that the coalition would assess its performance in January.

The winners were the Mayors and Independents (STAN), who together with their allies won ten seats, two of them already in the first round. The center-right ODS won seven seats, compared with the five it was defending, the Christian Democratic KDU-ČSL held on to all three of its defended seats, TOP 09 kept both of its defended seats, and five more mandates went to local alliances. According to a compilation by Expats.cz, ANO candidates suffered heavy defeats in most of the runoffs. In Kolín, Příbram and Cheb, STAN candidates beat them with results above seventy percent; in Česká Lípa, Martin Půta overturned ANO candidate Jitka Volfová's first-round lead; and the most painful defeat for the party came in Karviná. There, ANO's Lenka Brzyszkowská took 33.6 percent in the first round, while Petr Kazík, candidate of the local Osobnosti pro kraj (Personalities for the Region) group, got only 14.3 percent — yet in the second round Kazík won with 51.7 percent, taking away ANO's only defended mandate. Besides them, the Pirate Party also lost, as it lost its only directly elected senator. Only 21 percent of voters turned out for the second round, but estimates suggest that groups linked to the opposition could hold 61 of the 81 seats in the upper house.

The Senate defeat compounds a loss suffered in the local elections held on October 9–10, at the same time as the first round. According to figures from E15, in Prague STAN won with 23.2 percent, while ANO got only 14.4 percent, plunging to a historic low in the capital. In Brno, the joint list of the Christian Democrats and STAN finished first with 27.4 percent, while ANO was pushed into third place with 17.1 percent. The party won convincingly only in Ostrava, with 26.2 percent, and overall finished first in six regional capitals, down from eight in 2022. The governing coalition partners fared no better: the far-right SPD dropped out of the council in several regional capitals, including Brno, Ostrava and Liberec, while the Motorists won fewer seats in Prague than the Moravian regional party. According to an E15 commentator, the governing camp together reached only about a fifth of Prague's voters. One reason for this, in his view, lies in rising mortgage rates, which hit large cities especially hard; another is Babiš's style, which urban voters largely reject. According to an analysis by Around Prague, wherever the opposition did not split its vote, it confidently defeated ANO — in Ústí nad Labem, for example, seven liberal parties ran on a joint list that won 51 percent.

Babiš returned to the prime minister's office a year ago, after the parliamentary election of October 2025, and now governs in coalition with the SPD and the Motorists. He is regarded as one of Viktor Orbán's closest European allies, a co-founder of the Patriots for Europe party family, and, together with Slovakia and Hungary, stayed out of the EU loan packages intended for Ukraine. The current defeat does not yet spell his downfall, since ANO still stands at around 30 percent in the polls, and the next parliamentary election will not be held until 2029. Still, the opposition majority in the Senate remains a check on the government. The upper house can send laws back to the lower house, and constitutional amendments and electoral laws cannot be passed without it. Babiš is reportedly already talking about a “restart” and changes within the movement, and has himself admitted that the ANO name is no longer enough to win on its own today. In April, in Budapest, he got a glimpse of what happens to a populist ally once the opposition finally joins forces. Now the voters of Prague, Brno and the Czech Senate constituencies have sent him the same message, in their own language.

Ugar