Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala has been widely ridiculed for his claim that if he were given another term, he would be able to bring Czech wages level with German ones.

Fiala – who is in the middle of a PR campaign to raise his disastrous popularity ratings – made his comments during Czech Television’s influential Sunday political programme Otázky Václava Moravce, arguing his government is one of the most successful ones in Czech history and will bring the country to German and Austria standards if were given another four-year term.  I would “need at least eight years”, he said. He later reiterated these comments in his X account.

“It is typical that every brave vision here immediately encounters pessimistic critics and non-self-confident doubters,” he wrote.  

One of these critics, David Klimeš, head of the Independent Journalism Fund (NFNŽ), compared Fiala's claims with the boasts of Fiala's populist predecessor: “When I was listening to his statement, I recalled disconnected cryptic messages of former premier Andrej Babiš from the ANO movement and the way he promised '2 thousand billion from lithium',” Klimes commented in a Czech Radio podcast Vinohradská 12. 

Klimeš said that there is no logical reason on “economic” grounds to think that Czech wages, which are less than half of German ones, could, in eight years, come close to German ones, pointing out that Czechia is “economically linked to Germany” which outsources some production to the country “because we still have a lower wage level”.

Fiala’s comments have sparked a debate about whether the rightwing ODS leader and his team have a realistic assessment of the social and political situation in the country ahead of the national elections next autumn, which polls project will be a big victory for Babiš and his ANO party, or whether they are living in a bubble and suffer from groupthink.

ANO won all three Czech elections this year – the European Parliamentary elections in June, regional elections in September and even the Senate elections held in parallel.   

Trust in Fiala’s centre-right cabinet fell to historic lows already in 2023 following the energy crisis, which severely affected vulnerable parts of Czech society. Recently released data from Poverty Watch 2024 show that the number of Czechs in energy poverty in 2023 nearly doubled to 1.3mn from 770,000 in 2020.   

Although in the September edition of the CVVM’s survey,  trust in the cabinet improved slightly to 24%, the figure is still the worst on record in the past 10 years, along with one instance from 2017.   

Moreover, CVVM, which is an affiliate of the Czech Academy of Sciences, also found in its summer survey released earlier this month that only 20% of people evaluate the current economic situation in the country as good, while 34% see it as neither good nor bad, and 45% view is as bad.

The former university rector has tried to refresh his stuffy image with billboards showing him in an open-necked shirt, but this has simply provoked more ridicule.

Former head of the Czech branch of Transparency International, David Ondračka, called on the Spolu joint list of three government parties to remove Fiala as Spolu leader ahead of the autumn elections.

“ODS should switch its leader and premier Fiala for [Minister of Transportation] Martin Kupka. To change something, otherwise, they will hand it over to Babiš on a silver platter,” Ondračka wrote on X, adding that “the opposition have turned Fiala into a target. Go to a pub, the anger is spontaneous; people are just laughing at him. There is no way he can overcome it anymore.”

“In the long term, the government has probably been best assessed for its support of Ukraine,” commented the editor of cultural and political bi-weekly A2 Matěj Metelec, before adding that “after the election of Donald Trump, it seems that it [Fiala's backing of Ukriane] wasn’t an expression of anything else besides a willingness to be the loyal flag of wherever the US foreign policy wind blows.”

Fiala was quick to congratulate Donald Trump on his election as US president, and he also wrote on his X profile that during their telephone conversation, the two “talked about Ukraine, as well as about Israel and the Middle East”, concluding that “I am looking forward to our close cooperation.”

In the post, Fiala avoided commenting on Trump’s openness to force Ukraine into a peace involving territorial concessions to Russia, something Fiala’s cabinet has so far opposed.

Many prominent politicians inside Fiala’s neoliberal ODS openly back Trump, including its European Parliament leader, Alexandr Vondra, a former liberal who has now shifted to the radical right.