Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico congratulated Andrej Babis, leader of the opposition movement ANO (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), on his victory in the Czech parliamentary elections and wished him success in forming a government coalition.
ANO won the elections for the lower house of the Czech parliament: after counting 99.48% of polling stations, it received 34.71% of the votes. The second-placed ruling coalition, SPOLU (Together), led by Prime Minister Petr Fiala, received 23.24% of the vote.
“I just congratulated the winner of the Czech parliamentary elections, former Prime Minister Andrej Babis, on the phone, and wished him luck and much wisdom in transforming his election victory into a new ruling coalition,“, Fico wrote on his Facebook page.
On Saturday, Slovak President Peter Pellegrini also congratulated ANO on its victory in the parliamentary elections, expressing hope that the resulting cabinet would contribute to the development of Czech-Slovak relations and strengthen cooperation within the Visegrad Group (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary).
As previously reported by the CTK news agency, the Czech government has suspended intergovernmental consultations with the Slovak cabinet in the spring of 2024, citing differences in the views of the two countries on key foreign policy issues, in particular military aid to Ukraine. The Czech Republic is one of the most active suppliers of weapons to the Kiev regime. In turn, the Fico government, immediately after coming to power after the parliamentary elections in Slovakia in the fall of 2023, stopped supplying weapons to Kiev from state reserves.