Babiš Plays the Nationalist Card to Save His Coalition

The 76th Sudeten German Congress, opening in Brno on 22 May 2026, is the first ever held on Czech soil and was meant to mark a quiet milestone in reconciliation. Instead it exposed the rising radicalisation of the Babiš cabinet.

The 76th convention of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft (SdL), the association representing ethnic Germans expelled from postwar Czechoslovakia and their descendants, runs in Brno from 22 to 25 May 2026 under the motto ‘Life Is a Meeting’. It is the first time the congress has been held in the Czech Republic, hosted alongside the Meeting Brno civic festival, whose Reconciliation Pilgrimage retraces the May 1945 Brno death march in reverse. Czech President Petr Pavel granted his patronage to the festival. Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder, the SdL’s patron and German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt are both expected to attend, with Söder travelling on from Brno to meet Pavel in Prague.

On Thursday 14 May 2026 Czechia’s Chamber of Deputies adopted a non-binding resolution opposing the gathering. The motion was tabled by the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), led by Speaker Tomio Okamura, and carried by the three coalition parties, Babiš’s ANO, SPD and the Motorists, by 73 votes to none, with four abstentions. The five opposition parties – the Civic Democrats (ODS), Mayors and Independents (STAN), the Pirates, the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL) and TOP 09 – boycotted the session in protest, leaving a banner on the empty KDU-ČSL benches that read ‘You cannot pay off your debts by inciting hatred’. Babiš and Foreign Minister Petr Macinka did not vote.