Former general Pavel wins the presidential elections in the Czech Republic with a wide advantage

With nearly 90% of the votes counted, Petr Pavel, candidate supported by the government coalition of center right liberalhas obtained 57% of the votes, compared to 43% for his rival, the agro-industrial magnate Andrej Babis. Participation has been in this second and decisive electoral round at 69.8%, which exceeds the already high turnout at the polls in the first round (68.2%), held two weeks ago.

Pavel, with the electoral motto of “restore peace and order to the country”seems to have won 10 of the 14 regions of the central European country. Babis, his rival, led an aggressive campaign, accusing Pavel of wanting to drag the country into war and of sympathizing with Putin, in the context of the current conflict in Ukraine. This Saturday, however, he accepted defeat as soon as the polls closed and confirmed Pavel’s victory.

The controversial figure of Babis mobilized the vote against, something that he himself recognized in the final stretch of the campaign, very angry, in which he declared that these elections were a referendum on his person. Pavel, 61, will be the fourth president of the Czech Republic, a former communist country that has elected its heads of state by popular vote since 2013.

Between the years 1989 and 2008, the country’s president was elected by Parliament. Pavel is still in the charge controversial Social Democrat Milos Zemana political ally of Babis, who despite his defeat today will remain the leader of the main opposition party.

As an independent candidate, and despite his political inexperience, Pavel has captivated with his direct and sober dialogue, to which he has also known how to print a conciliatory tone. He began his campaign on a Harley Davidson motorcycle and in a flannel shirt, an image that became iconic and led some media outlets to describe his arrival on the scene as a “flannel revolution,” alluding to the “velvet revolution” of 1989, led by the playwright Václav Havel, with whom some see parallels.

At 1.83 meters tall, with gray hair and a groomed mustache, General retired does not usually distribute smiles, but her warm and assertive voice has inspired confidence among many people. She was born in the west of the former Czechoslovakia, a region that was the western tip of the Warsaw Pact, the communist military bloc.

His father was a military man trained to intercept and decrypt messages from NATO countriessomething that marked the career of Pavel, who also joined the Communist Party, although there is no indication that he collaborated with the feared communist political police.

Your education was spent in military institutions, then he enlisted in a paratrooper unit and he continued his training in the state military intelligence services Mayor, which later, already in a democracy, allowed him to work as a military diplomat in Belgium, the Netherlands and the US. He furthered his studies at American institutions such as the Defense Intelligence College of Bethesda, and British ones such as the Staff College of Camberley, the Royal College of Defense Studies and King’s College London.