Balancing technocratic and populist discourse: Andrej Babiš and COVID-19 pandemic response in Czechia
Abstract
Andrej Babiš is one of the representatives of technocratic populism in contemporary Europe. The technocratic political style has been deeply rooted in Czech and former Czechoslovakian communist regime and its reliance (or declared reliance) on expertise in decision making.
It is not surprising that it is also a viable political strategy in the era of a collapse of traditional political forces. Technocracy is, however, just one aspect of the political style of Andrej Babiš - the second one is populist appeal based on a sharp distinction between essentially good "people" and corrupted "the elite".
Babiš claimed that he could be representative of the will of the first and able to fix problems in governance caused by the latter. Aim of this contribution is to examine the relationship between a populist and technocratic aspect of Andrej Babiš's discourse in case of the decision-making process during the COVID-19 outbreak.
COVID-19 pandemics presumably didn't bring any new developments in his political style. Still, it may have shown its contradictory features more clearly: on the one hand we could see his responsivity towards popular demands (very often quite conflicting) and "folk wisdom" when it comes to COVID-19 response, and on the other, there are claims of the expert level, specifically in various government council bodies, that brings in solutions going against the will of "the people".
The research question of the contribution is how Andrej Babiš balance those two aspects of his discourse and how justifies his response to COVID-19 outbreak responding to both "popular" and "expert" level.