At 71, Andrej Babis has demonstrated indefatigable stamina. On Tuesday, September 23, the billionaire, a self-declared "Trumpist" candidate in the Czech Republic's parliamentary elections, scheduled for Friday, October 3, and Saturday, October 4, held his fourth rally of the day in Liberec, an industrial city in the country's north. Wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he bounded onto a stage that had been set up in front of a shopping center and spent two hours stirring up the small crowd of retirees who had come to support him, all while repeatedly attacking the handful of young people protesting his presence.

"They say we are pro-Russian, but don't believe it," Babis said, railing against the high school and university students who had come to defend the incumbent government's strong support for Ukraine, and who held large signs reminding the gathered crowd that Babis had been listed as an agent of the Czechoslovak communist political police in the 1980s.

Babis seized the moment to launch into an impromptu tirade against "that guy from Le Monde" who was trying to ask him questions. "Why do these foreign journalists always ask me about [Slovak and Hungarian prime ministers] Robert Fico and Viktor Orban, and about the Czech ammunition initiative? I am fighting for Czech interests," he said, reiterating his opposition to the program launched by Petr Fiala, the current pro-European conservative prime minister, which has enabled 3.5 million artillery shells to be delivered to the Ukrainian army since 2024.

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