The Guardian: Miloš Zeman makes Nigel Farage look like a nice guy. It’s even worse than that

A few examples. On the International Students’ Day on 17 November, which commemorates the closing of Czech universities by the Nazis in 1939, Zeman shared a platform with a Czech far-right party. And of the Czech Friends of the Earth, award-winning nature conservationists trying to protect a national park from illegal logging, he said he would treat them in a “good old medieval way: burn them, piss on them and salt them”. He really does make Nigel Farage look like a nice guy. [...]

To find a correct answer we have to recognise that Zeman is alone neither in the Czech Republic nor in the region of the post-communist EU member states. Rather, he is a vulgar version of the populists who have emerged across the region as its new political leadership. Think of Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Robert Fico in Slovakia. In the Czech Republic, we also have the dangerous oligarch, media and agro-business tycoon and minister of finance, Andrej Babiš.

With their authoritarian style and fanning of hatred towards minorities and refugees, they all stand as evidence to the story of the failed transformations of the post-communist countries. We have to face the harsh reality: the central European post-communist countries have failed to build a decent type of democracy, and most of them are in acute danger of slipping into authoritarian regimes. [...]

In central Europe, you could even conclude that neoliberal capitalism has encouraged corruption by declaring that everything should have its price tag. If “everything”, why not state decisions? Why not university degrees or public offices? It has been proved that all of those assets have been the subject of murky trades in the Czech Republic’s recent past. [...]

But this crisis of political representation is not confined to the east. It partly explains Brexit, the emergence of movements such as Podemos or Syriza, and Jeremy Corbyn’s transformation of Labour. The left movement in eastern Europe was totally demolished by communism, and all attempts to establish progressive social movements are still struggling with that stigma.

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