JIRI KAJINEK is one of the biggest stars in the history of the Czech Republic. Last month, the first instalment of a docudrama about his life drew a massive 1.3m viewers (the television-watching public consists of 10.5m people). A theatrical film, released in 2010, shattered box-office records. The unusual part of Mr Kajinek’s stardom is that he is a convicted double murderer, controversially pardoned by Milos Zeman, the president, in May. “I have been out seven months and I have not yet met a single negative response,” Mr Kajinek says.

Equal parts fascinating, commercial and sensationalist, “Ja, Kajinek” (“I, Kajinek”) is a television show befitting the political moment. Traditional institutions and establishment opinion are cause for distrust; maverick outsiders are celebrated. Mr Kajinek’s continued insistence that he is innocent, repeated prison escapes and general opposition to authority have long generated sympathy in the country’s folksier environs, even as urban elites label him a cold-blooded killer. “He is gifted with charisma, he is a storyteller,” says Ivan Bares, the director of “Ja, Kajinek”. “I watched people’s reactions as we filmed and they admire him as a modern hero.”

Mr Kajinek has the reputation of a man who will not let the system keep him down. Among other memorable incidents, in 2000 he busted out of Mirov Prison—a medieval castle and onetime Nazi dungeon, now used as a maximum security penitentiary—and eluded capture for 40 media-fevered days. In 1993, Mr Kajinek received a two-day pass in the midst of a seven-year sentence for robbery and assault. He did not return, and while still on the lam four months later is said to have gunned down a grey-market businessman and his bodyguard for 100,000 Czech crowns ($3,500 at the time). A second bodyguard survived to testify against Mr Kajinek, and a psychological report presented at the trial characterised him as an “irredeemable murderous beast”.

For his part, Mr Kajinek contends that “everybody knows” he is innocent, that the state’s case “doesn’t hold water” and that his conviction was based on the testimony of “a gypsy”. “We usually don’t believe gypsies,” he says, before adding, “Excuse me for calling him a gypsy.” Even as the Constitutional Court rejected five calls to overturn the verdict, Mr Kajinek’s acolytes pin the murders on a pair of dirty cops colluding with the criminal underworld. Amid the wild gangland atmosphere of the 1990s, the blurred lines between police, business, organised crime and ex-communist security services cast a pall over the 1993 murders. Today, public scepticism of people in power and feelings that opaque conspiratorial forces drive events have re-emerged. “In this country the state thinks that people are stupid, but they are not,” Mr Kajinek says.

In the general election in October, more than half of Czech voters backed newer anti-establishment parties; the nascent prime minister, billionaire Andrej Babis, comes to power promising to disrupt elites. Meanwhile, Mr Kajinek is free because of direct political intervention by Mr Zeman, who—facing a stiff re-election challenge this January—calculated that Kajinek fans are also voters he must win. In fact, the political shading of the Kajinek case is such that there is now clamouring for him to seek elected office directly. “If Zeman were not running I would run,” he says. “But I am not because I would take his votes and that is not polite.”

Putting Mr Kajinek’s miraculous escapes and outlaw past aside, his character elicits sympathy because he comes across as a person with old-fashioned manners chastened by a quarter-century of incarceration. While always denying responsibility for the murders, he admits to, and laments, an earlier life of larceny and violence. “When I was young I didn’t understand many things, I would not do it today,” the 56-year-old says. “But I tell you what, if I don’t have anything to eat, I am ready to steal from the state and the insurance companies.” It is a sentiment his many fans would support.