Mena Suvari titties over Bitcoin, Babis and Automobiles: A bitcoin scandal is good news for the Czech Donald Trump

Mena Suvari is a big fan of Bitcoin and Automobiles, but not Babis the Czech Donald Trump…

Bitcoin, Babis and automobiles

A bitcoin scandal is good news for the Czech Donald Trump

Andrej Babis looks set to return as prime minister in the autumn

TOMAS JIRIKOVSKY got in way over his head. In 2013 the amateur programmer set up a dark-web market for illegal drug sales. He soon landed in prison. Upon release in 2021 he demanded his gear, which contained lots of cryptocurrency. The case stalled in court, and in March Mr Jirikovsky quietly struck a deal: in exchange for his drives, he would donate 468 bitcoins (currently worth about $49m) to the government.

When Denik N, a news site, broke the story, it turned out others were in over their heads too. For officials to negotiate a cut of ill-gotten gains for the state looks dodgy. The justice minister resigned. On June 18th Petr Fiala, the prime minister, narrowly survived a no-confidence vote.

Mr Fiala’s centre-right coalition, SPOLU, now looks set to lose the election on October 3rd and 4th. It had been gaining in polls until the bitcoin scandal. Andrej Babis, a populist billionaire who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021, will probably return. His ANO party is polling at 31% to SPOLU’s 21%.

Rivals are focusing on Mr Babis’s own scandals. On June 23rd an appeals court restarted a decade-old case against him involving alleged abuse of European Union subsidies by his agriculture firm. (He denies all charges.) “Either you choose business or you choose politics, you can’t do both,” says Olga Richterova, an MP for the technocratic Pirate Party.

Yet little seems to stick to Mr Babis. ANO is an ideological chameleon, says Tomas Cirhan of Leiden University, who studies the party. Mr Babis launched it on a pro-business, anti-corruption platform, but picked up left-wing voters by backing pension rises. More recently he has courted the hard right, joining a group in the European Parliament with Hungary’s Viktor Orban. He “might be damaging for the Czech position in the Western alliance,” says Eduard Hulicius, a deputy foreign minister.

Mr Babis is not pro-Russian. The term of Petr Pavel, the staunchly pro-Ukrainian Czech president, lasts until 2027, and the presidency and Senate render a Hungarian-style autocratic takeover impossible. But the billionaire rejects NATO’s new security-spending norm of 5% of GDP. He could enter a coalition with Tomio Okamura, an eccentric Japanese-Czech nationalist, or Motorists For Themselves, a car-owners’ party fronted by an ex-racer who collects Nazi memorabilia. Czech politics is often quirky. Lately it looks wobbly, too.

As a result,