Description
The article investigates strategies of blame avoidance in the discourse of the Czech Prime Minister (PM), Andrej Babiš, on the conflict-of-interest case over the misuse of European Union (EU) funds. Taking a critical discursive perspective and working with a qualitative dataset of Babiš’s public pronouncements on the conflict of interest in the 2019-2021 period, the study reveals that the conflict of interest case has provided opportunities for the Czech PM to play the multi-dimensional blame game on the EU, orchestrate a discursive battle with the EU and invoke nationalist feelings. The article argues that this discursive patterning signals a departure from his hitherto pragmatic approach to the EU, with Babiš having increasingly radicalized his explicitly exclusionary construction of the EU, promulgating the anti-EU sentiment and countenancing the polarization between the EU on the one hand and the Czech Republic on the other.
