The Czech Republic is a central European country. It is a member of NATO and the European Union.
Andrej Babiš, a populist billionaire who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021, won re-election on October 3rd-4th 2025. His ANO party took 35% of the vote, well ahead of the incumbent centre-right SPOLU coalition's 23%. Voter turnout was nearly 70%; the new parliament is younger, with 33% of MPs being women, up from 25%.
Petr Pavel, a former general and staunch defender of the EU and NATO, is president until 2027. He has the power to refuse ministerial nominations. The presidency and Senate render a Hungarian-style autocratic takeover impossible.
The Czech economy has been lacklustre in recent years, with wages 10% lower than in 2019 for the country's 11m citizens.
The Czech Republic hosted more Ukrainian refugees per head than any other country (up to 600,000 in a country of 11m). The country also administers a secretive programme that sources ammunition for Ukraine around the world, delivering 1.5m artillery shells in 2024. Babiš has said the programme will be handed over to NATO.
In 2025 Deník N, a news site, revealed that officials had struck a deal with Tomas Jirikovsky, an amateur programmer who set up a dark-web drug market in 2013 and later donated 468 bitcoins (worth about $49m) to the government in exchange for the return of his cryptocurrency drives. The justice minister resigned.
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.