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Retired Czech general on course to beat tycoon ex-PM in presidential race

PRAGUE — Former Czech army chief Petr Pavel, a strongly pro-Western candidate who backs aid for Ukraine, was projected to win the Czech Republic’s presidential election on Saturday, early results and model projections showed.

A projection model by news website www.seznamzpravy.cz using early results, released by the Czech statistical office which is managing the vote tally, showed Pavel beating billionaire businessman and former prime minister Andrej Babis with between 57.6% and 58.8% of the vote.

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Broadcaster CNN Prima News, using voting models from agencies STEM and STEM/MARK, projected Pavel winning 58% of the vote compared with 42% for Babis.

Results from half of the country’s voting districts had Pavel leading the vote count with 54.9% to Babis’s 45.1%.

Full results from the two-day run-off vote were expected later on Saturday.

Pavel, a 61-year-old retired general, campaigned as an independent and has the backing of the center-right government that ousted Babis from power in a 2021 parliamentary election.

Babis, 68, a combative business magnate who had been prime minister since 2017, has sought to attract voters struggling with soaring prices and has vowed to push the government to do more to help them.

Czech presidents do not have many day-to-day duties but they pick prime ministers and central bank heads, have a say in foreign policy, are powerful opinion makers, and can push the government on policies.

Pavel has backed keeping the central European country of 10.5 million firmly in the European Union and NATO military alliance, and supports the government’s continued aid to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last year. (Reporting by Jason Hovet and Jan Lopatka; Additional reporting by Robert Muller and Jiri Skacel; Editing by Hugh Lawson and David Holmes)