The Czech centre-right cabinet of Prime Minister Petr Fiala survived the no-confidence vote filed by the opposition parties over the scandal involving the bitcoin donation of CZK1bn (€40mn) to the Ministry of Justice from a sentenced drug dealer.

Fiala’s cabinet was backed by 98 legislators, while 94 voted against the cabinet after liberal Pirate Party joined the motion backed by the two largest opposition parties, the populist ANO of billionaire ex-PM Andrej Babiš and the far-right and anti-EU SPD.  

“We have admitted an unnecessary problem, which could have been prevented,” Fiala said of the unprecedented scandal, which has already cost the cabinet job of Fiala’s ODS party ally and Minister of Justice, Pavel Blažek.

The vote was preceded by a marathon-long parliamentary session opened on Tuesday, June 17, and in which Fiala and his cabinet faced a barrage of comparisons of running Czechia as though it were a criminal state.

The survival of Fiala’s cabinet was largely expected, as ODS ruling coalition allies decided to back the cabinet well ahead of the vote, and the opposition parties, populist ANO and far right SPD, which filed the motion, could muster only 91 legislators, ten short of the majority in the current parliament.

Czech analysts, however, agree that the vote showed cracks in the ruling coalition over the scandal, as two legislators of the centrist Mayors and Independents (STAN) walked out of the parliamentary session to show their disagreement with the way Fiala handled the snowballing scandal.

Pirate Party backed the motion after ODS replaced scandal-hit Blažek with the most senior woman in its party ranks. The ANO wants Minister of Finance Zbyněk Stanjura to resign as well.

Stanjura admitted he knew of the bitcoin donation in advance, noting that “I view the bitcoin affair as a failure of Minister Blažek and his office, and I repeat again that the Ministry of Finance had nothing to do with the whole process, nor with the Justice resort decision to accept a billion from a drug dealer,” Stanjura wrote on his Twitter social media profile.

Blažek’s ministry had accepted CZK1bn (€40mn) in bitcoin from a sentenced drug dealer, Tomáš Jiřikovský, who donated the bitcoins after his release from prison in 2021. The donation, as well as subsequent transactions, when the Ministry auctioned the donated bitcoins, are under police investigation.

The donated bitcoins arrived from an illegal marketplace, Nucleus, it was later reported in the Czech media, even though the bitcoins were supposed to be legal.

The Ministry of Justice had already sold some of the bitcoins in 78 auctions between March and May at a 10% discount, marking the first time that a public institution in Czechia sold a cryptocurrency.

The scandal rocked the cabinet just less than four months before the October elections, which are widely expected to be won by ANO, which regularly polls above 30% and has a more than 10% lead ahead of the Fiala-led SPOLU joint list, which is struggling to secure even 20% support.

The scandal could reduce the support for the ruling coalition parties from Fiala’s cabinet, which is already one of the least popular cabinets on record. Meanwhile, several far-right and anti-EU parties are polling above or around the 5% parliamentary threshold, including the stalwart far-right SPD, anti-green Motorists and red-brown STAČILO! (It’s been enough!) list.

While in the cabinet, Blažek had a firm backing from his ODS party colleague, Fiala, which enabled him to weather allegations of meddling in a court case involving ODS politicians, as well as an off-the-record meeting with a Kremlin-linked lobbyist.

Blažek is seen as instrumental in having secured party support for Fiala when he first became chairman of the neoliberal ODS in 2014, a time when ODS was facing an existential crisis after its cabinet, led by Petr Nečas, collapsed in 2013 amid corruption allegations.