Prague, Oct 14 (CTK) – Czech ANO head Andrej Babis’ challenging the Slovak Constitutional Court’s decision to cancel previous verdicts saying he figures as an StB communist secret police aide in their files unrightfully, goes beyond what a man aspiring for the PM’s seat in a democracy can say, Jiri Pehe wrote in Právo on Saturday.
In reaction to the court decision last week, Babis, a Slovak-born billionaire who might become Czech prime minister after his ANO’s expected comfortable victory in the Czech October 20-21 general election, said the decision was a result of a mafia’s action.
He said the mafia to blame is the same mafia that is behind scandals he faces on the Czech scene and which aim to oust him from policy, such as the Stork Nest affair and the controversial audio recordings on an anonymous Twitter account, and now the mafia is even trying influence the European anti-fraud office OLAF’s enquiry into his affairs, Pehe writes.
Babis added that the timing of the Slovak Constitutional Court’s verdict was no sheer coincidence, Pehe writes.
The Czech Republic is a country where politicians are far from eager to show respect for the rules of a law-abiding state, but Babis’s statements go beyond all limits, Pehe writes.
Not only Babis has repeatedly accused his political opponents and the Czech police of plotting against him in the Stork Nest case of a suspicious drawing of an EU subsidy by one of his firms, not only he challenged concrete police investigators, without submitting a single piece of evidence, but now he has arrogantly lashed out at one the of the top constitutional institutions of Slovakia and even at a respected EU office, Pehe writes.
One would not wonder if Slovakia raised an official protest against Babis’s words, he writes.
Another question is whether Babis’s statements amount to a crime. To accuse, without any evidence, the Slovak Constitutional Court, the Czech police and even the EU anti-corruption authority that they act based on a mafia instructions is no longer a mere defamation, it amounts to alarm mongering, Pehe writes.
After the Slovak court decision, the leaders of most Czech political parties said they cannot imagine forming a government with a man in a situation where courts are yet to decide on whether he was an StB agent, Pehe writes.
The leaders should probably extend their reservations. It is impossible for the post of a democratic country’s prime minister to go to a man who asserts that the police in his homeland, the Constitutional Court of a neighbouring country and the EU’s anti-corruption office act on the order of a mafia, Pehe writes.
It is known from history that the politicians who showed such disrespect for democratic state institutions and who seized power in the past, caused immense damage, Pehe adds in conclusion.
