The New Face of 21st Century Fascism? Anti-Roma MP Filip Turek accused of ‘adoring’ the Nazis by Czech President
15 January 2026
“The fact that a gypsy (sic!) was burned should, if anything, be taken as a mitigating circumstance…” This is how politician Filip Turek is said to have commented on the horrific 2009 arson attack by neo-Nazis in Vítkov, Czech Republic, in which the then two-year-old Romani girl Natálka was severely injured, sustaining 70% burns.
Outrage followed this revelation, and in a public statement in October 2025, the ROMEA news organisation declared that Turek’s comment can only be understood “as an open, racist, relativization of the attempted murder of a child.” ROMEA called on the leader of the ANO movement and Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, not to nominate Turek – the Nazi-adoring honorary chair of the Motorists for Themselves party – as a minister; and should he go ahead with the nomination, ROMEA asked the President of the Republic not to appoint him to the position.
Babiš went ahead and nominated Turek, notorious for his anti-Roma, homophobic, misogynistic and racist posts and statements. In the opinion of a broad swathe of civil society, much of the opposition, and the President of the Czech Republic Petr Pavel, Turek is plainly unfit for public office.
Since October, the President has repeatedly stated that Turek’s behaviour casts serious doubt on the politician’s loyalty to the fundamental principles of the constitutional order, and signalled that he would refuse to accept the nomination of Turek.
The controversy came to a head on 9 January 2026, when President Pavel published a letter addressed to Prime Minister Babiš, formally rejecting the Prime Minister’s nomination of Filip Turek to run the environment ministry. Pavel described the prospect of Turek’s membership in government to be unique, and wholly unprecedented since the adoption of the Constitution:
“In his various statements and actions, he has repeatedly adored, or at least trivialized, one of the worst totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, Nazi Germany, which was responsible for the worst war in human history and the genocide of millions of innocent people.”
The President accused Turek of repeatedly insulting the dignity, and questioning the equality of women and members of various minorities, and of having often trivialized acts of hateful violence, “even those committed against young children.” He stated that the intensity and frequency of Turek’s actions show a lack of respect toward the Czech legal system and cast serious doubt on Turek’s loyalty to basic constitutional principles.
In response to the President’s letter, on 12 January 2026, the Czech Government appointed Turek as a Commissioner for Climate Policy and the Green Deal. As reported by Romea.cz, Turek announced that he will ‘indirectly’ lead the Environment Ministry from that Government Commissioner post. This move was described by the opposition as an attempt to circumvent the constitution, and lawyers contacted by the news agency all agreed that a Government Commissioner cannot lead a ministry, not even ‘indirectly’.
Background Check on Filip Turek
So, who is this ‘new face’ of Europe’s far-right and how much of a neo-Nazi is he? In the run-up to the 2024 European elections, dodgy photos of Turek surfaced online, including one where he wore a golden helmet with the emblem of the Greek fascist party Golden Dawn. Lest there be any doubt concerning intent, Turek declared, in a post he forgot to delete: "All of you who don't know what the meander on my formula helmet means... It's the symbol of Golden Dawn, the last hope of Greece. Death to all the leftists who are tearing Europe apart."
In another photo his racing helmet was emblazoned with a symbol used by the aerial-warfare branch of the Wehrmacht Luftwaffe. Turek, in yet another image, appeared to give the banned Nazi salute from a car, and he was also photographed with a candlestick stamped with a swastika sitting on his desk. In a subsequent TV interview, Turek said he was a collector of Nazi memorabilia, but denied being a sympathiser.
This denial became harder to sustain when screenshots of his Facebook comments between 2013 and 2018 were published, in which he referred to Adolf Hitler as a "golden daddy" and wrote that he always fills up with 88 litres of fuel – 88 being the neo-Nazi abbreviation for ‘Heil Hitler’.
In an open letter, the Greens called for Turek to be stood down as a candidate, but he was duly elected to the European Parliament in 2024, where concerns over ‘unacceptable conflicts of interest’ soon emerged. According to his Wikipedia page, on 23 June 2025, the website Page Not Found reported that Turek had been accused by his former partner in a criminal complaint of domestic violence, threatening with a firearm, and rape. He denied the accusations.
Shock waves followed the 2025 general elections, when the victorious Babiš cobbled together a coalition with the (further) far-right parties, and Turek was proposed to be Minister of Foreign Affairs. The news site Deník N, published a tranche of his hastily-deleted Facebook posts, which strongly suggested Turek was, at the very least, unfit for purpose in such a role.
Openly racist, with repeated endorsements of Hitler, and expressions of admiration for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Turek repeatedly referred to himself as ‘the Führer’, and likened himself to Benito Mussolini regularly using slogans and phrases associated with the fascist cult of personality, including one beloved of Italian neo-fascists today: "A Tutti, Avanti Benito Mussolini!" In another post, he stated: "Since I am white, I give the Nazi salute and publicly mock the American army like an oligarch ...”
His posts were also viciously homophobic and misogynist as a matter of course, using abusive terms to refer to LGBTQ people, he described homosexuality as an ‘innate defect’; he constantly derided women as intellectually immature, and emphasized the historical superiority of ‘real white men’. In one post he wrote:
"So the opinions of infantile mothers, feminists, faggots, and deviants are important? Women's suffrage was the biggest mistake of the 20th century, and one day people will realize that."
In August 2021, he wrote: "White men built and, thank God, continue to build this world as we know it. Is there really a retard who finds this unnatural?" His posts contained outrageous comments about other states – he called Norway a "left-wing parastate" and "the vanguard of elite degeneration", against which he would "declare war". Also, Deník N noted:
“The Motorists' candidate for head of Czech diplomacy made racist comments about representatives of foreign states - for example, he described former US President Barack Obama as "a n****r who can at most sell hashish at the train station."
His posts were replete with racist references to Black Americans, Arabs, and Roma, including the callous ‘mitigating circumstance’ comment about the badly-burned Romani toddler Natálka, and the convicted neo-Nazi arsonist. Following the 2019 terrorist attack in Christchurch which targeted Muslims during Friday prayer, and claimed 51 lives, Turek posted the caption "Cleaning up in New Zealand".
Normalising prejudice, neo-fascism, and anti-Roma racism
Turek responded "I find it difficult to react to this shameless effort to discredit me. Attempts to make me a racist are absolutely ridiculous.” The honorary chair of the Motorists party was side-lined from the Foreign Affairs Ministry to head the Environment Ministry, but the controversy around his fitness for public office never went away.
The latest move by Babiš, to circumvent the President’s refusal to nominate Turek as a minister, by appointing him as Commissioner for Climate Policy and the Green Deal is not only absurd – as Turek’s Motorists for Themselves is anti-environmentalist, bought and paid for by the fossil fuel lobby – but deeply damaging for democracy and constitution. Prime Minister Babiš now heads a three-party coalition, which includes two far-right parties who are anti-Roma, anti-immigrant and reliably regressive on a number of policy issues; hard-core nativists whose commitment to democratic norms is at best ambivalent.
The honorary chair of the Motorists is the most visibly problematic: Turek’s fascistic and racist statements and actions, as the President put it, “cannot be put down to one-off excesses due to the recklessness of youth”, and repeatedly show a lack of respect for the rule of law. Notwithstanding the evidence before his eyes, Babiš’s maintained his stubborn second-chance-support for the "Nazi-adoring" Turek. This may yet prove to be a profound misstep towards normalising prejudice, anti-Roma racism, and other forms of fascistic hate speech in public and political life.
Photographs: Denis Lomme © European Union 2025, Christian Creutz© European Union 2024,
Source - European Parliament
