Cover page of Czech weekly Respekt (December 5th issue) showing presidential candidates with highest chances: (from left to right).: Andrej Babiš, Danuše Nerudová and Petr Pavel. Photo by Filip Noubel, used with permission. The Czech Republic will hold the first round of its presidential election on January 13 and 14, with three candidates leading in the polls. This will open a new era in Czech politics after a decade of the Miloš Zeman’s presidency that brought major scandals and profoundly divided Czech society. Since 2012, the president has been elected directly by the people in two rounds with a two-week interval if no candidate secures over 50 percent of the votes in the first round. The two candidates with the highest votes in the first round are then allowed to run for the second round. The presidential term is for five years, and the same person cannot hold the function for more than two terms. While there are eight official candidates for the January 2023 election, most observers and recent polls seem to indicate there are in fact three contestants with real chances, as they each gather between 25 to 29 percent of the polled support. All three are widely divergent in their views and values, which also shows how Czech voters remain divided over this election. Danuše Nerudová is the youngest among eight other, at 44— and the only woman. She is an economist, and mostly known for her work as rector of Mendele University in Brno, the second-largest city in the country, and the capital of Moravia. This is also the town where she was born and worked most of her life. During her term at Mendele University, the institution was caught in a series of scandals involving plagiarism and as result lost some of its accreditation. Nerudová has denied any responsibility for wrongdoing. Until mid 2020 Nerudová was an unknown figure on the political scene, but many experts point at her rapidly growing popularity in the past 5 months, perhaps also thanks to her successful use of social media, mostly Instagram, where her official account indicates 160,000 followers, a significant number in a country of 10 million people. According to this analysis on the Seznam Zprávy online portal, her popularity is mostly due to her gender, in a country that never had a woman president or prime minister: Její výhodou bylo, že ve společnosti byla jakási poptávka po kandidátce jejího typu – ženě v nižším věku, která má za sebou nějakou veřejnou funkci…Díky této unikátní pozici jediné ženy Nerudová jednu dobu rostla organicky. V počáteční fázi kampaně pomáhala i jistá podoba se slovenskou prezidentkou Zuzanou Čaputovou a jistá „závist“ Čechů, kteří Čaputovou srovnávali s Milošem Zemanem. Her advantage was that there was a sort of demand within Czech society for a candidate of her type — a younger woman who has held public office before… Thanks to this unique position as the only woman, Nerudová's popularity grew organically for a time. In the initial phase of the campaign, a certain similarity with Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová and a certain “envy” of the Czechs, who compared Čaputová with Miloš Zeman, also helped. Indeed, many Czechs have contrasted the image of Slovak President Čaputová, a young, modern tolerant woman with racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and alcoholic Czech President Miloš Zeman. Politically, Nerudová stands for liberal democracy and claims that, if elected, she would promote what she calls stakeholder capitalism, as she explained in an interview to the portal Expats.cz: I think Europe will head in the direction of what’s called ‘stakeholder capitalism.’ That means company decisions will not be driven only by maximizing profits, but also by questions of sustainability and global politics. That’s one of my priorities — to have higher social cohesion because, at the moment, it’s very low. We need to find a social model which will guarantee that the one-third of households that are currently in, or at risk of, poverty are helped and included. Andrej Babiš is a household name in Czech politics: the 68-year-old candidate is a former finance minister, and later prime minister (2017–2021), known for numerous scandals, including lawsuits accusing him of embezzling funds from the European Union, and a close ally of current president Miloš Zeman. Born in Slovakia to a Slovak family, he is known for having willingly collaborated with the secret services of then Czechoslovakia. He built a large business empire in the early 1990s during the post-Communist transition period, and amassed a large fortune. He launched his own party in 2012, ANO (Akce nespokojených občanů, Czech for “action by dissatisfied citizens,” that also sounds like the word “ano,” which means yes in Czech) which can be described as populist.