Babiš’s confidant is back in the game. In Prague, it is a government coalition
Radmila Kleslová, the former vice-president of the ANO movement and former important adviser to Andrej Babiš, succeeded in the municipal elections and is returning to an active role.
On the ANO candidate, voters elected her from 7th place to the capital city council, and in Prague 10, the already leading candidate of the movement finished in third place with a gain of 17.67 percent of the vote and nine mandates.
As Seznam Zprávy found out, Kleslová will participate in coalition negotiations in Prague 10. She stated that the ODS and TOP 09 candidates in the tenth city district under the name Společné pro Praha 10 approached her for negotiations.
“We will discuss the formation of a coalition. We were approached to meet for a joint meeting. We’ll see how it continues, I’m not ruling out any scenario,” Kleslová told Seznam Zprávám.
She did not hide her enthusiasm that ANO won one more mandate in this part of the city than the Pirates, who also proposed the current mayor Zdeněk Hřib, deputy Olga Richterová or her brother and ex-MP Mikuláš Ferjenčík on the local candidate list.
Negotiations at the Prague-wide level for ANO, according to her, lead candidate and member of parliament Patrik Nacher and chairman of the movement’s Prague organization Ondřej Prokop. “I trust our team that they will negotiate it at the municipality,” she said.
She takes the fact that she made it to the municipality and can negotiate a coalition in Prague 10 as an award for her opposition work. Ex-prime minister Babiš is said to have also congratulated her. “Mr. President was happy to be in Prague last night. He appreciated that we did our best in the campaign,” described Kleslová, who before the fall of the communist regime worked in StB structures in intelligence.
The mayor has fallen
Kleslová used to be a close adviser to Andrej Babiš before his direct entry into politics. In the past, for example, he wanted her to help him prepare a political party.
After the creation of ANO, Radmila Kleslová resigned from her parent party, the ČSSD, and became a functionary of the movement. She served as its vice-president and mayor of Prague 10. But then the concurrent political functions began to conflict with the activities of her law firm, which worked for municipal and state enterprises.
In 2015 and 2016, she ended up both in the leadership of Babiš’s movement and in the town hall of Prague 10. Although she continued as a representative there, it no longer looked like a higher position. It was not until this spring that she negotiated a good position on the candidate lists of the ANO movement.
This May, in an interview for Seznam Zprávy, Kleslová described the motivation for her political comeback. This could also be interpreted in the context of how the influence of the former 1st vice-chairman of the movement, Jaroslav Faltýnek, has weakened in ANO over the past year. Within the movement, the gradual fall of Kleslova seven years ago was linked precisely to Faltýnek’s rise to power.
“It is a painful stage of my life. I have information about it, I am aware of what was happening at the time, but life goes on. But I don’t think that after my removal, better times have come for ANO in Prague,” said Kleslová in an interview four months ago.