Petr Pavel's trust in Andrej Babiš

Tucked in Pres. Petr Pavel's speech at the Castle last night on the occasion of the Oct. 28 holiday was a lone sentence giving Pavel an escape clause from some of his earlier proclamations. The parliamentary elections, he said, delivered a message about the "worthy ability [of voters] to resist the most extreme offers promising unrealistic, unviable, naive or even dangerous solutions." This was an obvious allusion to Stačilo!, which Pavel had warned against just prior to the elections. It was also a reiteration of what he had said on Oct. 5 about how the election results showed that most voters want to retain the pro-Western orientation of the country. Pavel is signaling that the "most extreme" political forces have been shunted aside and that the others he had warned against - the Motorists and SPD - can be acceptable under certain conditions. Whatever hesitancy he had toward cabinet-level collaboration with these two parties is now secondary, because he trusts ANO Chair Andrej Babiš to keep them in line.