CZECH PRESIDENT MILOS Zeman was taken to a Prague hospital, shortly after meeting Prime Minister Andrej Babis following a general election in which the billionaire populist was narrowly defeated by a centre-right alliance.

Babis met Zeman, his long-time political ally, a day after his ANO party lost to the Together alliance, which said it was ready to form a majority government with another grouping.

But Zeman had made it clear earlier that he would appoint the head of a party, not an alliance, following the election, suggesting Babis would get the first attempt at negotiating a viable cabinet.

After the talks at Zeman’s residence outside Prague, the president, who has been grappling with liver problems according to local media and politicians, ended up in Prague’s Military University Hospital.

The president cast his ballot in the residence because of poor health, less than a month after he spent eight nights at the military hospital.

Zeman’s office has been secretive about his illness, giving no details for weeks.

The Together alliance of the right-wing Civic Democrats, the centre-right TOP 09 and the centrist Christian Democrats won 27.79% of the vote, while Mr Babis’s ANO party earned 27.12%.

The alliance would have a majority of 108 seats in the 200-seat parliament together with another grouping comprising the anti-establishment Pirate Party and the centrist Mayors and Independents.

Together leader Petr Fiala said yesterday that the two alliances would only talk about a government with each other and ask Zeman to tap him to form the government.

The two alliances and ANO will be joined in parliament by the far-right, anti-Muslim Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) movement led by Tokyo-born entrepreneur Tomio Okamura which scored almost 10%.

Babis currently leads a minority government with the left-wing Social Democrats, which was until recently tacitly backed by the Communist Party that ruled the former totalitarian Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989.

But the Communists were ousted from parliament at the polls for the first time since World War II, failing to meet the five-percent threshold for any party to enter the assembly.

Babis, a food, chemicals and media mogul, is facing police charges over alleged EU subsidy fraud and the bloc’s dismay over his conflict of interest as a businessman and a politician.

Last weekend, the Pandora Papers investigation showed he had used money from his offshore firms to finance the purchase of property in southern France in 2009, including a chateau.

He has denied any wrongdoing and slammed the allegations as a smear campaign.

Babis (67) won the previous general election in 2017, but it took him nine months to put together a minority government with Mr Zeman giving him all the time he wanted.