Czech Presidential elections: Eight condenders, three favourites, two days of voting
euronews.comCzechs go to the polls on Friday and Saturday to vote for their next president.
There are eight candidates in the running, and there will almost certainly be a second-round of voting later in the month as opinion polls suggest it’s neck and neck between former prime minister Andrej Babiš, retired army chief Petr Pavel, and former university head Danuše Nerudová.
Controversy has stalked each of the main candidates for months, and with around a quarter of voters still undecided after advance voting began, events this week could still tip the race.
Babiš, a billionaire populist who has recently toned down his anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric, was handed a last minute salvo when he was acquitted over a months-long corruption trial on Monday.
Pavel and Nerudová claim the respectable and liberal mantle, and hope to galvanise the centrist mass of voters who turfed Babiš out of office at the last general election in 2021, but their fates could be sealed at the last television debate on Thursday night.
In its latest survey, Median, a local pollster, puts Pavel in the lead with 29.5%, some three percentage points ahead of second-placed Babiš. But Ipsos, another polling group, has Babiš ahead by 0.8 percentage points.
In both polls, former university rector Nerudová trailed a little behind the two men, but she was well ahead of six other candidates who each had less than 5%.
Since none of the candidates are likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, a second-round runoff later in the month between Babiš and Pavel seems the most probable outcome, according to Vladimíra Dvořáková, a political scientist at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
But Nerudová, 43, and popular with younger voters, still stands a chance of becoming
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