Czech nationalists

Grotesque, crude and clearly insulting, the puppets are designed to grab attention and burst despotic bubbles. Meanwhile, Central European populists serving Moscow and Beijing's interests, like Czech President Milos Zeman and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, metamorphosise into giant slugs eating the lettuce leaf of democracy.

Right-winger Petr Fiala was named the Czech Republic's new prime minister on Nov. 28 in an unusual ceremony, with wheelchair-bound President Milos Zeman speaking from behind a plastic barrier because he has COVID-19.

The president is still to appoint the other 17 ministerial nominees. That's meant to be a formality, but Zeman is a master of turning such formalities into political drama.

The president has told the country that he plans to object to one ministerial nomination. While he didn't name anybody, the proposal of Jan Lipavsky as foreign minister is widely assumed to be the target.

Nonetheless, President Milos Zeman, who wields the constitutional authority to appoint governments, invited the populist Babis - with whom he has a longstanding power pact - to meet on Sunday.

The local press was full of complaints over the tightly controlled event, which Orban stressed had definitely no connection to the upcoming election in Czechia but was merely a standard state visit. Naturally, then, the two premiers refused to take questions, but treated the few journalists admitted to an hour-long chat.

A 26-year-old evangelical Christian and theology student at Prague's Charles University, Roll founded Million Moments alongside Mikulas Minar in 2017. Dressed in his trademark mustard-yellow, it was the red-headed Minar who originally chaired the organisation and so featured prominently on the front pages as the biggest protests in the country since the Velvet Revolution erupted.