PRAGUE — Andrej Babiš is what Donald Trump wants to be: The most powerful man in his country. He isn’t even the president or prime minister of the Czech Republic.

He’s a billionaire, media mogul, chairman of his own political party, deputy prime minister and finance minister. He’s also popular, trusted by 64 percent of people in a poll released earlier this month.

Like fellow billionaires Silvio Berlusconi and Trump, Babiš, 61, uses his money and connections to be the anti-political politician, a man whose wealth allows him to stand seemingly aloof from the petty bickering, deal making and often corruption that afflicts ordinary politics.

The outsider is becoming a familiar trope of late in Western democracies. Poland's parliamentary elections on Sunday saw rock star Paweł Kukiz, who openly professes his dislike of politicians, come in third. Jeremy Corbyn, a man from the further reaches of the political left, surprised the Labour Party’s establishment by winning its leadership this year. And from France to Austria to the Netherlands, far-right parties are gaining votes.

"He now concentrates political, economic and media power to the extent that has been unprecedented in this country since 1989. He is at permanent risk of conflict of interest" — Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka

Babiš’s ANO party (which stands for “Action of Dissatisfied Citizens” in Czech and has an acronym that translates as “yes”) began as little more than a personal political vehicle. The surprising success of what Babiš insists on calling “our movement,” though his face is plastered on election posters, saw the upstart party take second place in the 2013 elections. It is now a member of a coalition government led by Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, a Social Democrat. This is Babiš-style anti-political politics.

Babiš is clear that he only got into politics to clean up a system he deems deeply corrupt and ineffective. There is something to back that up. The Czech Republic consistently ranks near the bottom of Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index for the region for the region, and Czech politics have been regularly convulsed by scandals.

“I don’t need politics. My life would be better without this job,” he told POLITICO.

His program is generally pro-business and not particularly ideological. His main argument is that the management skills that made him the country’s second-richest man allow him to do a better job of running the country than career politicians.

Despite its unusual construction, the government has proven to be unexpectedly stable in a country where there had been four prime ministers in the previous four years. Even in power, Babiš continues to sell himself as an outsider, and his distaste for day-to-day political give and take appears to be authentic. Top politicians in his party are largely drawn from other spheres: Defense Minister Martin Stropnický was an actor, while Prague Mayor Adriana Krnáčová had a controversial tenure as head of the country’s Transparency International branch.

“In a coalition you cannot govern, you can moderate,” Babiš said. “You have to make compromises, it takes too much time. To decide you always make a commission and impact studies.”

His frustration with politics as usual is barely disguised, which makes the more traditional politicians here nervous. Earlier this month, 77-year-old ex-foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg cited his opposition to Babiš as the reason for staying in politics.

With Babiš as finance minister, debt is falling, the economy is growing, tenders for public contracts — though still flawed — are more transparent than they used to be. The majority state-owned cash cow CEZ, an electricity utility, is paying out dividends to the public coffers.

The path to riches

Babiš, now 61 and a former member of the Communist Party, got rich in the murky post-communist 1990s. Slovakia's Nation's Memory Institute, which keeps communist-era security police files, accused him of collaborating with Czechoslovakia’s security service, the StB. Like many ex-communist countries, the Czech Republic bars collaborators from holding certain government posts. He was cleared of the accusation by a Slovak court, which confirmed that he was wrongly registered as a secret agent.

What is not in doubt is that Babiš’s past as one of the favored “red managers” elite allowed him the rare opportunity of working abroad, where he was a representative of a Czechoslovak import-export company in Morocco. That gave him the knowledge of business and capitalism, putting him in the front ranks of the post-communist elite. He took control of Agrofert, originally a subsidiary of Petrimex, the company he worked for, and it now forms the core of his business empire.

He’s now worth $2.6 billion, according to Forbes.

Babiš now owns 100 percent of Agrofert, a massive chemical and agro-business conglomerate that owns or leases 0.7 percent of the Czech Republic’s land, is the country’s largest private employer and supplies about 30 percent of its bread. The company’s more recent acquisitions in media have brought particular scrutiny.

In June 2013, four months before the general election, Agrofert bought the MAFRA media house, publisher of two of the country’s most important daily newspapers, Lidové Noviny and Mladá Fronta Dnes, once the most widely read serious daily in the country and the only one with a dedicated investigative unit. Mass resignations and reorganizations followed. MF Dnes has since trended tabloid while shunning investigations.

Babiš denies meddling. “I don’t interfere with editorial matters. It is an absurd attempt to spread lies,” he told a web-based news service just after the takeover.

Journalists aren’t convinced.

“I did not want to work for an oligarch or an active politician,” said Michal Musil, a former deputy editor-in-chief at MF Dnes, who resigned shortly after the Agrofert takeover. Along with a host of defectors, he created a rival magazine called Reporter.

Although his newspapers have not become propaganda outfits, under Babiš’s ownership there is a dearth of criticism for the current finance minister. For example, his trip to the United States in April received disproportionate coverage as compared to other Czech media.

“He has succeeded in neutralizing the media in this country,” said one prominent Czech media figure who declined to comment on the record as he still has ties to MAFRA.

Critics are wary of the overlap between Babiš’s private interests and his public duties.

“He now concentrates political, economic and media power to the extent that has been unprecedented in this country since 1989,” Sobotka said earlier this year. “He is at permanent risk of conflict of interest.”

Babiš has always denied a clash between his political duties and his businesses. “I observe the law,” he has said.

A political heavyweight

Babiš’s distaste for domestic government negotiations means he is even more frustrated with consensus-driven European politics, especially on hot-button issues like how the EU is dealing with the growing flood of refugees.

“Europe is completely bureaucratic. It is unacceptable that somebody in Brussels can decide on migration for us,” Babiš said in an interview with POLITICO. “If Mother [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel has invited these people, she has to take them.”

Greece also draws biting criticism for its years of economic flailing. “They will always cheat — always,” he said.

That tough tone softened when the topic turned to Russia. NATO “cannot stay on this idea that Russia is the biggest problem,” Babiš said. The Czech Republic has been a reluctant participant in the sanctions levied against Moscow for its actions in Ukraine.

“We have given a lot of hope to Ukraine without thinking to the end, who will pay the bills,” he continued. “Ukraine is not ready for the European Union and Ukraine was always under the influence of Russia.”

And although Babiš called Vladimir Putin’s policies in Ukraine “a mistake,” when asked whether that meant the Russian president bore the blame for annexing Crimea and the chaos unleashed over the last year, he responded, “What is true or not true, who knows?”

Babiš still has something to prove at home. Sobotka’s derisive comments about his conflicts of interest speak to tensions bubbling within the ruling coalition, and Babiš is quick to call the prime minister a “career politician” who has “never had a real job.”

Babiš is careful not to express ambitions of becoming prime minister — that wouldn’t jibe with his apolitical image. But ANO is the country’s most popular party, and Babiš is its most popular politician. Unlike Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, who took himself out of the running to be prime minister in that country’s recent parliamentary election, Babiš has never ruled out taking the top job after the next Czech elections in 2017.