Babis survives a no-confidence vote, 83 to the 101 he needed to lose

Czech lawmakers kept Andrej Babis in office on Thursday. An opposition motion to bring down his coalition drew 83 votes in the 200-seat Chamber of Deputies, 18 short of the 101 needed. The governing parties put 94 votes against the motion.

The debate ran for three days and about 27.5 hours, Radio Prague reported. After it, 83 opposition members backed the no-confidence vote and 94 members from ANO, Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) and the Motorists voted it down, Czech public broadcaster CT24 said. It was the cabinet's second survival of a no-confidence vote. Local and Senate elections are less than two weeks away.

The opposition tabled the motion over the government's proposed 2027 budget, Babis's alleged unresolved conflict of interest, and what it calls attacks on institutions. The budget would run a deficit of 386 billion koruna, about 15.8 billion euros, the second-largest deficit in the country's history. That single figure is the concrete object the debate kept returning to. A deficit of that size, in a year when voters also pick local councils and a third of the Senate, is a campaign document as well as a fiscal one.

The vote math is simpler than the debate. The coalition does not need a majority of the whole chamber to survive. It needs the opposition to fall short of 101. With 94 votes of its own against the motion, it had a cushion even if a few of its members had wandered. The opposition's 83 means it did not hold every seat outside the coalition, or it does not have the seats to begin with. Either reading leaves Babis in the Straka Academy.

The conflict-of-interest charge is the older argument. Babis, a billionaire whose Agrofert group has sat at the centre of Czech politics for a decade, has faced repeated claims that he has not fully separated himself from the firms that take public money. The opposition put that claim back into the motion alongside the budget. The vote did not test the claim. It tested whether 101 members would fire the cabinet over it. They would not.

The timing is the part that binds the fiscal number to the electoral one. Local and Senate elections fall inside a fortnight. A government that has just published a 386 billion koruna deficit, and just survived a three-day attempt to remove it, goes into those elections as the incumbent that held. The opposition goes in as the side that mustered 83. In a Senate race fought in districts, 83 in Prague is not a local result. It is a signal of how many members the opposition can hold together on a national motion.

SPD and the Motorists are the partners that supplied the 94. ANO is Babis's own party. A coalition of those three is what voted the motion down. The opposition did not peel any of them in public. A three-day debate is a long time to look for a defector. None appeared in the tally CT24 published.

What the deficit buys, and what it costs, was argued and not settled. A 15.8 billion euro gap is large against the Czech budget, and it is the second-largest on record by the opposition's account of the government's own proposal. Surviving the vote means the proposal lives into the election period. It does not mean the budget is passed. A no-confidence motion is a verdict on the cabinet, not a line-item vote. The 386 billion figure still has to clear the budget process if the cabinet is still there to present it.

Babis remains prime minister because 83 is not 101. The next hard date is the local and Senate vote, not another procedural motion. If the opposition's case is the deficit and the conflict claim, both will be on the doorstep in the next two weeks, with the chamber's arithmetic unchanged until the voters change it.