"Aleš, what did you choose?" Babiš leads supporters up Lysá hora again

On Saturday morning, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Labour Minister Aleš Juchelka and Industry Minister Karel Havlíček climbed Lysá hora in the Moravian-Silesian Region together with several dozen supporters.

A festive mood prevailed before the climb, with fans posing for photos with the prime minister and chatting about the route ahead. Juchelka, incidentally, didn't wear the hiking boots Babiš had given him as a birthday present — four months late. He did, however, bring his dog along.

Juchelka also took some ribbing over the choice of route — when Babiš discovered how rocky the trail was, he joked, "Aleš, what did you choose?" Asked by one supporter, wearing a cap with the slogan "Sorry jako," about his presidential ambitions, Babiš said he would not run for president again.

During the group photo session, insults directed at the prime minister were shouted several times from a nearby hotel. Both the crowd and Babiš himself simply laughed it off.

Not his first such hike

Babiš tried a similar tactic to court voters a year ago, when he also climbed Lysá hora in August, less than four months before the parliamentary elections. The route he chose, starting from the Sepetná stop, is one of the most popular: about 6.5 km one way, taking 2.5–3 hours to climb with an elevation gain of nearly 800 metres.

Mountain climbs as an election tradition

Mountain hikes have long been part of the image-building campaigns of Czech politicians. President Petr Pavel climbed Lysá hora in 2022 as part of his own presidential campaign, and a year later scaled Kleť in the Český Krumlov region. In 2025, he had planned to hike up Javorový peak in the Beskydy Mountains during a visit to the Moravian-Silesian Region, but the trip was cancelled due to bad weather.

Babiš himself, back when he was finance minister, climbed Lysá hora in 2016 together with his lookalike Jan Čupa and the local mountain rescue service. Former President Václav Klaus climbed Sněžka, the Czech Republic's highest peak, on multiple occasions, and in 2004 scaled Blaník with several hundred eurosceptics ahead of the EU accession referendum. Twenty years later he repeated the route — this time driving to the top by car. Former ČSSD chairman Jiří Paroubek climbed Říp twice: in 2006, ahead of parliamentary elections, together with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and two years later, ahead of regional and Senate elections, while criticising the government of the day.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz