A majority of Czechs support the Chamber of Deputies releasing ANO leader Andrej Babis, the likely future Prime Minister, for prosecution in the Capi hnizdo case, according to a poll by Kantar CZ published yesterday.
56% of respondents supported Babis’s release for prosecution, while 41% of respondents opposed it.
Babis regained his seat in the recent elections, and with it full parliamentary immunity. Prague City Court requested on Thursday that the lower house release Babis for trial for a fourth time. Babis’s trial has been suspended for now.
Babis has previously stated that he will not ask the Chamber of Deputies to release him. He calls the subsidy case a political trial and has long denied guilt.
In the poll, 37% of respondents said the lower house should definitely release Babis, and another 19% said it should probably release him. 20% of respondents were strongly opposed to extradition, while 21% were rather opposed. The poll was conducted between 1-3 October and was answered by 1,515 respondents.
Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) leader Tomio Okamura has already announced that his movement will not support the lifting of Babis’s immunity. ANO is negotiating with SPD and the Motorists to form a new government, which will have a majority of 108 votes in the 200-member lower house.
The leader of the Motorists, Petr Macinka, said yesterday that he considers the Capi hnizdo case to be political. “If I had to answer the poll, I would be in the ‘rather no’ group,” he said. Radek Vondracek (ANO) said in the same TV debate that the case has been going on for ten years and the risk of politicisation should always be considered.
Babis and his former adviser Jana Nagyova, now an ANO MEP, are facing charges over a CZK 50 million subsidy for the Capi hnizdo (Stork Nest) complex near Olbramovice in Central Bohemia. The Prague City Court acquitted them twice, but both verdicts were overturned by the High Court of Appeal in Prague. In its latest decision, in June this year, the appeals chamber obliged the city court to find the defendants guilty on the basis of the evidence.
