Andrej Babis: from Czech tycoon to political powerbroker

Billionaire Andrej Babis emerged from nowhere to capture second place in Czech elections on Saturday with promises of prosperity and squeaky clean politics to voters fed up with austerity and corruption.

The Slovak-born food tycoon, who used doughnuts to woo votes for his fledgling ANO (YES) party, has turned political powerbroker as the election’s fragmented outcome threatens political stalemate.

Voters rallied behind the self-professed “incorruptible tycoon”, but the 59-year-old wiry, greying former Communist says going into government is not his cup of tea.

“We don’t want to govern, we want to push through bills in parliament,” the second richest Czech said in his strong Slovak accent after ANO scored a surprise 18.6 percent of the vote — just 1.8 percentage points less than the winning Social Democrats.

“We’ll start with bills to reform the state,” he said.

Babis’s meteoric rise comes in the wake of a nosedive by right-wing parties, which were hit hard by the June collapse of Petr Necas’s government over a high-profile spy and bribery scandal.

Babis launched Agrofert, the Czech Republic’s largest trading conglomerate, whose products include food, fertiliser and chemicals.

With a net worth of $2 billion (1.5 billion euros), Babis ranks 736th on this year’s Forbes list of world billionaires.

He reinvented US President Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” campaign slogan, promising austerity-weary Czechs “Yes, we’ll be better-off” with a politician who knows how to make money.

But his membership in the Communist Party before 1989 has been a sticking point for some voters who opposed the totalitarian regime that crushed opposition while ruling the former Czechoslovakia for four decades.

“True, I don’t have the best profile,” Babis has said but staunchly denied allegations that he was also a communist secret police agent.

Thanks to a father who he claims “co-founded foreign trade in Slovakia” under communism, Babis grew up on the road, attending elementary school in Paris and high school in Geneva.

Don’t call me Berlusconi

His knack for making money came young.

“I worked since age 15, delivered milk, unloaded parcels at the station, did decorating, built weekend houses, all to make money,” he once said.

After earning an economics degree, he followed in his father’s footsteps and worked as a company representative in Morocco in 1985-1991.

After the Velvet Revolution toppled totalitarian rule in 1989, Babis returned home to see his country split into two states and to find himself jobless.

That was when he co-founded Agrofert, the Czech Republic’s fourth largest holding company with over 200 firms boasting consolidated revenue worth 132 billion koruna (5 billion euros, $7 billion) in 2012.

He founded ANO in 2011, determined to lure voters with promises of clean politics in a country ranked more corrupt than Rwanda by Transparency International.

Pundits have called him the country’s Silvio Berlusconi, but Babis shuns any comparison to Italy’s disgraced media tycoon turned politician.

Berlusconi “committed tax fraud, I pay hundreds of millions. And I don’t indulge in sexual adventures”, Babis said recently.

Babis sparked uproar earlier this year by buying the Mafra publishing house that notably owns the top-selling DNES broadsheet.

A few days later, he made an angry phone call to a reporter for not writing a story about his press conference, raising eyebrows in local media and on social networks.

Born on September 2, 1954, Babis is married to Monika, who is 20 years his junior and who praises his “cleverness, charm and sense of humour”.

The keen tennis player has two children from his first marriage and two with Monika.

“I’m a wealthy man. I have made almost all of my dreams come true. I have earned billions with honest work,” he says.

Andrej Babis: from Czech tycoon to political powerbroker