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PRAGUE — Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is facing unprecedented attacks from his coalition partners after turning down an EU offer of 70,000 extra coronavirus vaccines — endangering his political future just months ahead of an election.
Babiš had been holding out for more vaccines, insisting the proposal was unfair to Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who engineered the push to get several lagging EU countries a greater slice of future vaccine deliveries. Under the offer from the Portuguese Council presidency — which had support from 24 of 27 members — Austria wouldn’t get any extra doses, as data showed the country wasn’t actually in dire need of them compared to its neighbors.
But the ploy failed. The 24 countries just went ahead without the dissenters — the Czechs, the Austrians and the Slovenians — and signed a deal under which 19 nations gave doses to the five worst-off EU members.
Now Babiš is under fire back home. And his coalition partners, the Social Democrats, are hanging him out to dry.
“The prime minister negotiated other vaccines for the Czech Republic himself, he did not consult the government on the procedure,” Czech Interior Minister and Social Democrat chairman Jan Hamáček tweeted on Friday. “It is purely his responsibility and he has to explain to the citizens why we have lost 70,000 vaccines.”
Foreign Minister Tomáš Petříček, another senior Social Democrat, tweeted that Babiš “has to take responsibility for himself and apologize to those who will be waiting for vaccines again a little longer.”
The attacks are the most barbed tongue-lashing the Social Democrats have given Babiš since the minority coalition government came to power in 2017. They suggest the Social Democrats may be looking to separate themselves from an increasingly unpopular government ahead of October’s legislative elections in an attempt to improve its own standing. Recent polling shows the Social Democrats falling short of the 5 percent threshold required to enter parliament.
In the wake of the failed negotiations, Babiš has taken to Czech media to defend his decision.
“The Portuguese presidency is just a puppet of the great states that simply wanted to punish Sebastian Kurz for permitting himself to tell the truth that [the vaccine] should be divided according to population. I consider it a scandal,” he told Radiožurnál.
He did not say, however, that the Czech Republic has actually fallen behind on vaccines because it did not purchase all the doses it was entitled to buy under the EU vaccine distribution system, which offered every country an equal share based on population size.
“The principle of offering us 70,000 [doses] to remain silent in order to abandon the principle of fair distribution is unacceptable,” Babiš added. “Some politicians declare solidarity on the outside, but behind closed doors they do the exact opposite.”
Kurz’s office announced on Friday that Austria would be sending 30,000 vaccine doses to Prague as a gesture of solidarity.
“We consider not supporting the Czech Republic in particular as unfair and as lacking in solidarity,” Kurz said. “We will therefore support the Czech Republic bilaterally … and we consider it as very positive to have heard other European countries are willing to do so, too.”
The domestic criticism of Babiš’s move is reminiscent of the recent crisis in neighboring Slovakia, where former Prime Minister Igor Matovič was forced to relinquish his post because two coalition parties objected to his unilateral purchase of the Sputnik V vaccine.
Apparently, Babiš is considering taking the same step. He told the Deník N news server he was thinking of purchasing 1 million Sputnik doses. The European Medicines Agency has not yet approved the Russian-produced vaccine.
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