PRAGUE — He’s a media-wise billionaire used to getting his own way, and promising to run the government like a business. He wants immigrants to stay away. And although his political positions are tricky to pin down, they are tinged with populist and muscular rhetoric.

Andrej Babis, 63, who built an agribusiness and media empire in the ruins of the Soviet collapse, is the front-runner to become the Czech Republic’s new prime minister, running as the leader of a movement he created a few years ago for that very purpose.

“He is like Trump, really,” said Jiri Pehe, a political analyst and director of New York University in Prague. “You can watch him and see how he suffers in Parliament, forced to listen to other people.”

In a year in which Europe has teetered through a series of fateful votes — in the Netherlands, France, Britain, Germany, Spain and then this weekend in Austria — the outcome of Czech parliamentary elections on Friday and Saturday may well determine whether a fissure between the more prosperous nations of Western Europe and the increasingly authoritarian countries of the East will widen into a chasm.