Czechia’s opposition ANO party has removed MP Margita Balaštíková from its candidate list after a secret recording revealed she tried to order the killing of her ex-husband’s dog. 

In the dog-loving country, the scandal is the biggest setback so far for populist ANO, which is a heavy favourite to win the October parliamentary elections. 

The party led by billionaire ex-prime minister Andrej Babiš has now removed MP Margita Balaštíková from the candidate list in the Zlín region. 

In the wiretapped conversation, recorded by her ex-husband Jaroslav Balaštík and shared by online news outlet Seznam Zprávy (SZ) and other Czech media, Balaštíková is heard ordering the murder of her ex-husband’s and his new partner’s pet dog. 

The news immediately captured headlines across the country earlier this month, leading to Balaštíková's removal. 

“I am sorry for this on a human and political level,” Babiš’s deputy in the ANO party, Karel Havlíček, said during a political discussion on CNN Prima News last weekend, adding that “after release of the information, Mrs. Balaštíková immediately stepped down from the candidate list and from the shadow cabinet.”

Balaštíková was a number two on the Zlín region candidate list and would have had a strong chance to return to the parliament this autumn. She was also one of ANO’s potential candidates for the agriculture portfolio in the future cabinet.  

ANO regularly polls above 30% nationwide, maintaining a wide lead ahead of the SPOLU joint list of the sitting PM Petr Fiala, as bne IntelliNews has reported.

The recordings come from 2023, when Balaštíková was divorcing her ex-husband, who was collecting evidence from the turbulent end of their marriage, which involved police interventions, SZ reported.

“When will you set up the killing of the dog?” Balaštíková is heard asking. A male voice responds: “Don’t you understand that the man is risking jail time?”

Balaštíková was also documented to have planned on using her contacts in the local hygiene authority to send inspectors to her ex-husband’s company in a push “to finish off” the company, according to SZ.  

This is not the first scandal to hit an ANO, whose leader Babis has a record of controversial dealings with rivals in politics as well as competitors of his food and chemical conglomerate Agrofert, including accusations of using state authorities to exercise pressure on Agrofert’s competition.

In the mid-2000s, before he entered politics, Babiš ruthlessly squeezed out owners of the meat company Kostelecké uzeniny only to take over Kostelecké with his Agrofert. The case which became a symbol of how Czech oligarchic groups are capable of utilising their influence in the country’s police, judiciary and banking to liquidate or swallow companies with lucrative assets.  

As bne Intellinews reported last March, Babiš instructed his ANO PR team to “get me these files on that f***er” Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Lipavský in an email he accidentally sent to environmentalist Jan Rovenský.

In response to a bne IntelliNews query, Rovenský, who credits Babiš for his role in saving the town of Horní Jiřetín from demolition to make way for coal mining, described the instructions as “disgusting” and said that “it is in the public interest for people to know about it”.

However, it is the scheming against Balaštíková’s ex-husband’s dog which caught the attention of international media.

Czechs are a dog-loving nation, with at least 42% of households owning a dog, according to data quoted by Politico.eu. “We all love animals,” ANO’s unquestioned boss Babiš reassured his voters during the ongoing election campaign, Politico noted.   

While the country struggles to punish perpetrators of sexual violence against women and children — as in a recent case concerning the repeated rape of a minor by her stepfather — perpetrators of violence against dogs in Czechia are regularly handed prison sentences and the trials are reported in the nationwide media.