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This article argues that a new type of populism is emerging that combines entrepreneurial populism with centrist populism and takes as an example the success of the Czech party ANO and its leader Andrej Babiš. Entrepreneurial populist leaders are businesspeople who claim that because they have been successful in running a business, they can run a government efficiently, like a business. Entrepreneurial populists lack a coherent ideology and instead take advantage of where the political opening is greatest in the political spectrum. In the Czech Republic in the 2010s the opening was greatest in the centre, as much of the population had social liberal attitudes, although there were no social liberal parties to represent them. To test these hypotheses, the article presents a series of regression models explaining party vote choice in the 2013 and 2017 Czech elections. The findings confirm a demand for a centrist social liberal party that did not exist at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the developments of the welfare state's reaction to the pandemic in Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia during 2020–2022, asking whether the changes in social policy represent only temporary responses to the challenges of the pandemic, or if the changes will likely lead to long‐run transformative changes in social policies. All three countries applied emergency adaptive changes to some extent except for job protection, as the short‐time work schemes represent a permanent change in Czechia and Slovakia. Furthermore, the absorption capacity of the welfare state was relatively good, which enabled the countries to avoid the negative social impacts of the crisis in terms of increased unemployment, poverty, and social exclusion. We argue the governments did not introduce permanent third‐order change because they already introduced such changes during the transition to the market economy in which they introduced a low‐expenditure welfare state trajectory. During the pandemic, this trajectory limited their fiscal space for introducing reforms that could radically expand the welfare state. Policy learning and political constellations also had some influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous studies show that welfare policies are important for populist voters, few studies have analysed in depth the social policy proposals of different types of populist parties. Since the Czech Republic is one of the few countries with a strong centrist-populist party that has been in power, this article concentrates on the Czech case and compares this centrist-populist party to the largest right-wing populist party and the main non-populist parties. We argue that the centrist and rightist Czech populist parties have developed different types of welfare agendas. The centrist-populist party supports encompassing and universalist policies (which it links to economic efficiency and administrative improvements); in contrast, the right-wing populist party supports the protection of those in need while preserving the principles of merit and economic incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]