Andrej Babiš has spent most of the past year winning. In October 2025 his ANO movement carried him back into the prime minister’s office, and the billionaire has governed with a comfortable lower-house majority ever since. The weekend runoffs for the Czech Senate have now handed him the opposite experience: not one of his candidates made it into the upper chamber.
A third of the 81 Senate seats, 27 in all, were up for renewal in two rounds of voting that ended on Saturday. ANO ran in 24 districts and had 13 people left standing for the second round. Every single one of them lost. In Karviná the party even gave up the only seat it was defending, after Petr Kazík, nominated by the regional movement Osobnosti pro kraj, came from a distant second place in round one to take the runoff with 51.7 percent. ANO’s group in the chamber therefore shrinks from 15 to 14 senators.
The winners came from the camp that governed until last year. The Mayors and Independents (STAN) and their regional partners collected ten seats, the Civic Democrats (ODS) seven, while the Christian Democrats and TOP 09 kept everything they were defending. The Pirates, by contrast, no longer have a senator of their own. Opposition-aligned groups could end up controlling around 61 of the 81 seats, and ODS veteran Miloš Vystrčil looks set to stay in charge of the house.
Babiš did not sugar-coat the outcome, calling it “catastrophic”. He pinned the blame on weak regional party branches and candidates who, in his view, leaned too much on the ANO brand, but said his government would not change course.
That matters beyond the numbers. The Senate cannot block ordinary laws for long, yet it has a decisive voice on constitutional changes and on confirming judges for the Constitutional Court. With turnout in the runoffs at only about 21 percent, analysts caution against reading the result as a forecast for the next general election, but it is the first clear electoral warning for a cabinet that has cut direct military aid to Ukraine and plans to rework how public broadcasters are financed.
