President Miloš Zeman arrived in Belgrade for a state visit to Serbia and expressed his thoughts on the recent Czech presidential elections, which he believed would be a referendum on the government, but instead turned into a referendum on Andrej Babiš (ANO). Zeman stated that the election should have been focused on the economic and energy crisis rather than peacemaking and considered it a mistake that Babiš positioned himself as a peacemaker.

Zeman expressed that he won the presidential elections twice because he never made it a referendum on himself. He also commented on the election of Pavel, stating that the Czech population tries to balance the power between political parties, but he had a question mark over the term “authoritarian system”.

Zeman agreed that Pavel has a strong mandate due to the high number of votes obtained, surpassing Zeman’s record five years ago by 959,000 votes, a margin of 16.6 percentage points. He stated that the higher the number of votes, the stronger the mandate of the directly elected president.

Article by Prague Forum