Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said he will defend the country’s key auto industry and will challenge a European Union proposal to abandon gasoline and diesel cars by 2035. “We will not agree with the ban on selling fossil fuel-powered cars,” he told the iDnes news website on Sept. 22. “It’s not possible. We can’t dictate here what green fanatics devised in the European Parliament.”
The nation, one of the world’s top automotive producers on a per-capita basis, will make the topic a priority when Prague assumes the EU’s rotating presidency in the second half of 2022, Babis said. Czechs will support an infrastructure for electric vehicles but will not subsidize their actual production, he said.