Political Critique: Czech Local Elections: a sharp turn to the right

Probably the sharpest, most explicit messages showed up in the northern parts of the country, namely the city of Most – a peripheral area devastated by heavy industry (and subsequent job loss when the coal mines closed) which suffers from a prolonged housing crisis caused by real estate brokers tied into local politics. Curiously enough, it is the party most intertwined with the poverty business that fans the flames driving proper the proper, good folk into a racist frenzy: the Mostians for Most Association (SMM) were openly advocating segregation, establishing locations excluded from housing social support and, yes, building “scum villages” to which they would move the “rabble”. As for determining who exactly the “rabble” is supposed to be, the procedure is not exactly clear but one can assume it will involve a color filter. [...]

SMM did not win the elections in Most, but they came third; enough to leave a mark on the city’s future (un-)social policy. Their campaign did, however, echo with that of the party which came fourth – the traditional, conservative Civic Democrats (ODS), a party that has been a determining factor in Czech politics since the nineties and has fallen on hard times with the advent of mass populism. Undeterred, they got the message – ODS has been promising Zero Tolerance To Foreigners (this particular slogan coming from Mladá Boleslav – a city whose economic lifeline happens to be foreign workers from the Škoda automobile factory) and scoring great successes with it; if there is an overall winner to this election, they are it. What the hell? [...]

The xenophobic SPD ended up with a disaster, with only 155 representatives across the whole country. Their leader, famously fearmongering fraudster Tomio Okamura, promptly amended his previous statement of expecting “hundreds of SPD representatives” to “I meant a three-figure sum”. His people were a lot less phlegmatic, though; “enjoy your immigrants”, tweeted a failed SPD candidate in Prague. And for all the horrible things to be said about the results in Brno, the openly neo-Nazi party Decent People flunked the election hard.

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Politico: Czech parliament confirms Babiš minority government

The coalition nearly fell apart last month when President Miloš Zeman rejected the Social Democrats’ choice for foreign minister, Miroslav Poche, because of his support of migrant quotas. Social Democratic chairman Jan Hamáček, who is also interior minister, will temporarily fill the post. [...]

On the other hand, said Pehe, it could be difficult to topple the ANO-led government because the opposition is not united. “If the Social Democrats leave the coalition, Zeman has sway over the [right-wing extremist Freedom and Direct Democracy party] and the Communists and could convince them that supporting the government is in their best interest because they could lose their influential parliamentary positions agreed with Babiš,” he said. [...]

Not everyone is happy about the coalition deal. Putting the Communists into a position of influence for the first time since 1989, when the Velvet Revolution put an end to 40 years of Communist Party rule, has sparked public protests in the Czech capital as well as political resentment. [...]

The government is also likely to feel heat from the Catholic Church, because one of the Communists’ demands in exchange for supporting the government was a tax on property confiscated by the Communist regime and restituted after the revolution, including churches.

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Jacobin Magazine: Zeman, Again

But this comparison only goes so far. Zeman is very much a political insider, a fixture in Czech politics since the Velvet Revolution. He participated in the anticommunist Civic Forum and joined the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly in 1990. He helped rebuild the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), which he joined in 1992, and he served as prime minister from 1998 to 2002. He ran for president in 2003, but Václav Klaus won thanks to divisions in the party. Zeman never fully forgave the leadership, and, in 2009, he founded the Party of Civic Rights, which has yet to win any seats in parliament. Nevertheless, Zeman returned to national politics with a bang in 2013, when he won the first directly elected presidential race. [...]

His public pronouncements, particularly on Islam and migration, echo those of the traditional far right, though he often uses even less varnished terms than Marine Le Pen or Alternative for Germany. Zeman has forged tight links with the organized right, most notably with Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), a virulently anti-Islam party that won twenty-two seats in November’s parliamentary election. [...]

Nevertheless, this election had the highest turnout since 1998, with 66.6 percent. On the one hand, the big numbers reflect citizens’ desire to rebalance politics following the shock of November’s parliamentary elections. On the other, it underlines the fact that the role of president occupies a disproportionate place in the Czech imagination. [...]

Some of this has merit: Zeman’s strongest support comes from smaller towns and rural areas — though he won Ostrava, the third-largest city in the country — and his voters tend to be older and less educated. But dividing society into enlightened Western subjects and post-communist dinosaurs blocks both a clear analysis of the country’s political situation and any hope of changing it. These categories do more to flatter Zeman’s opponents than to help understand what motivates his supporters.

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Politico: Babiš in office in Prague, but not yet secure in power

As a result, ANO is 23 votes short of a majority in the 200-seat Chamber of Deputies. So Babiš — who denies the charges — will spend most of the holiday break trying to seduce party leaders and mavericks into supporting his administration when it faces its first vote of confidence in early January.

That will not be easy. This week, the center-right Civic Democrats, the second-strongest party in the chamber, and most of the other parties declared again that they would not support a minority government led by Babiš. And Tomio Okamura, the leader of the anti-immigration and anti-EU SPD, which finished third in the voting, said his party would only support a government that would carry out its hardline program. [...]

“I don’t think Babiš wants to get the votes this time,” Pehe said. “The way he’s been putting together this government, without many discussions with the other parties, he is fully prepared not to pass the vote of confidence.” [...]

In addition, the prime minister may also be working on ways to ensure his immunity from prosecution — as a member of parliament — is not lifted. The last parliament lifted his immunity just weeks before the election. But Babiš now has immunity once again, as a member of the new parliament.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Avoidable Rise of Andrej Babiš

Almost everyone classifies Babiš as a populist, but it’s harder to find someone who can define what that means. Babiš presents himself as a straight-talking man of the people, standing above petty party politics, and he has chimed in with anti-immigrant rhetoric and rejected European Union quotas on migrants. Yet to lump him in with the governments of Poland and Hungary, or the far right in Germany and Austria, stretches the definition of populism beyond meaning. In fact, looking for evidence of this affiliation, a BBC correspondent resorted to commenting on his “handing out donuts at Metro stations.”

Babiš is no ideologue: he is first and foremost a technocrat. He packed his manifesto with language that describes challenging corruption and building a smaller, more efficient, and more transparent government. He wants to introduce e-government, citing Qatar as a model, and he wants to grow the number of professionals and businessmen who participate in civil service, increasing wages to compete with the private sector. The words “transparent” and “understandable” appear throughout this platform, and his campaign presented him as man of action, opposed to other politicians’ “blah-blah-blahing.” [...]

But this hardly amounts to root and branch opposition. Indeed, the European Union has helped make Babiš very rich, and members of ANO already sit in the European Parliament as part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. One of them even serves as commissioner for justice, consumers, and gender equality. That few news outlets have commented on this reflects how distorted European politics look when seen through the prism of centrism against populism. [...]

Although Babiš himself is nowhere near as hostile to the European Union as some suggest, anti-European sentiment clearly played a big part in this election. Although few outside the SPD seriously want to leave, TOP 09, the only party that openly campaigned in favor of the EU, barely scraped past the 5 percent threshold.  

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Quartz: Eastern Europe’s major economies are having an underappreciated “Goldilocks moment”

The IMF now forecasts that “emerging and developing Europe” economies to grow 4.5% this year, upping their prediction by 1.5 percentage points from six months ago. This increased optimism is based, in part, on bumper growth in the second quarter of 2017, when Romania’s economy increased 5.7% versus a year earlier, the Czech Republic’s by 4.7%, and Poland’s by 4.4%. By comparison, the EU average was 2.4% growth over the same period.

All of these economies are still heavily reliant on manufacturing, exporting much of their production to the rest of the EU. For example, the Czech Republic—er, Czechia—has the lowest unemployment rate in the EU and about 35% of the Czech labor force is employed in manufacturing, the highest proportion of any EU country. When Europe is growing, demand for the things made in these economies grows. Often this means cars: automakers including Toyota, Volkswagen, and Peugeot have factories in the Czech Republic. Romania’s largest exporter is Dacia, a subsidiary of French car company Renault. [...]

Poland is also benefiting from a surge in workers from Ukraine. It’s estimated that as many as 1 million Ukrainians are working in Poland at any one time, who come for higher wages and more opportunities, especially since the recession that hit after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia. Ukrainian workers have helped address Poland’s demographic issues—an aging population and low fertility rate—in addition to counterbalancing the emigration of millions of Poles after the nation joined the EU in 2004. [...]

For now, the benefits of their economic models seem to outweigh the risks, so the EU’s eastern economies are likely to keep growing, according to JPMorgan’s Amoa. EU funds are there to be invested, central banks have supportive monetary policies, and political tensions aren’t yet at a breaking point. JPMorgan Asset Management is buying these countries’ currencies and government bonds in Poland, Amoa said.

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The Atlantic: The Toxic Politics of Migration in the Czech Republic

The self-promotion of the former communist elite into a new post-communist ownership elite ranked high among populist grievances everywhere in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Babis responded to these resentments with his own distinctive approach to problem-solving: He purchased almost all the Czech Republic’s media—one of its largest radio stations, its two most influential daily newspapers, and its most popular news website, among other properties. [...]

Anti-refugee feeling turned about the fortunes of Viktor Orban, which had been sagging in Hungary after a failed attempt in 2014 to impose heavy taxes on internet use. Anti-refugee feeling delivered an unprecedented majority of the vote to the reactionary and authoritarian Law and Justice party in the Polish elections of October 2015. Anti-refugee feeling prevailed in Austria, where on October 16 an absolute majority of the population voted for immigration restrictionist parties: 31.6 percent for the People’s Party, and 27.4 percent for the Freedom Party—once such a pariah that in the year 2000 the rest of the EU sanctioned Austria for allowing Freedom Party members into a coalition government. [...]

Babis was never a true believer in the far right. He is not a true believer in anything. While he rejected EU resettlement quotas and opposed adoption of the euro currency, he did not share the more ideological anti-EU position of the rest of the European far right. “They give us money,” he said of the EU in October 2016, “so our membership is advantageous for us.” What Babis offered Czechs was all the benefits of EU membership with none of the costs. If that position was unrealistic … well, that was information that could await the post-election period.

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Politico: Million dollar Babiš

The result is something of a slap in the face for Brussels. Not only has Babiš opposed EU-mandated immigrant quotas and repeatedly accused Brussels of “meddling,” but the ODS has also been firmly anti-EU since the days of its founder, the famously Euroskeptic former Prime Minister and President Václav Klaus. [...]

The upstart Pirates, a pro-EU party, finished a surprise third with 10.79 percent of the vote. A vigorous campaign by popular YouTube vloggers urging young voters to go to the polls appears to have borne fruit for the party of digital enthusiasts, which also wants more direct democracy. The Pirates did well in every region in the country. [...]

“So, even Babiš, who appears to be very Euroskeptical, will have to modify his views because he cannot run a successful economy — as he promises to do — without being fully integrated with the rest of the European Union. Not to mention that some of the companies that are in his [Agrofert] empire are in Germany, Switzerland, France.” [...]

That is important to Babiš both politically and personally. He was charged with defrauding the EU of a €2 million subsidy after the Czech parliament stripped him of immunity in September. As a newly elected deputy, he will again be immune from prosecution — unless there is a new vote and he is stripped of his immunity again.

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Politico: Prague poised to turn away from Brussels

Recent polls predict the maverick ANO movement and its founder, former Finance Minister Andrej Babiš, will be the election’s biggest winner with some 25 percent of the vote. Support for Babiš is largely due to his vow to fight political corruption — despite the fact he currently faces charges of subsidy fraud. But he has also denounced EU-imposed migrant quotas and “EU meddling” in Czech politics. [...]

Czech voters are deeply skeptical about both the euro and the EU project itself. According to a 2017 survey by the Czech Public Opinion Research Center, only 18 percent of Czechs “strongly agree” the country should be a member of the bloc, while 38 percent “somewhat agree” — by far the lowest support for EU membership among members of the so-called Visegrad Group of Central European nations, which also includes Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Another poll by the same organization found that only 21 percent of Czechs are in favor of adopting the euro. [...]

Other party leaders have kept the door open to governing with ANO — while insisting they do not want Babiš to be prime minister. But Babiš has repeatedly insisted that he will not let someone else take the reins if ANO wins the most seats in parliament, and there is no obvious alternative candidate within his party for the premiership. He also has an ally in President Miloš Zeman, who is likely to throw his weight behind a coalition headed by the ANO leader.

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Slate: The Czech Trump

Appearances, however, have a pesky tendency to deceive. Despite the immense progress their country has made, the mood among most Czechs is increasingly bitter. Though the country is affluent, they are convinced that the political establishment has failed them. Though most of the foreigners you see in the streets of Prague are here to spend money on beer, souvenirs, and museum tickets, Czechs are intensely preoccupied with the supposed threat posed by migrants and terrorists. And though the country’s political class has, on the whole, served it reasonably well, voters are now lending their support to a larger-than-life billionaire who promises to smash the system.  [...]

YES is not the only noxious movement that is doing well. There is also the right-wing extremist SPD, the left-wing extremist KSCM, and the populist Pirate Party. If you add up the vote of all these anti-establishment parties, forces that are deeply critical of representative democracy are likely to win an overall majority in the Czech Republic. This means that Babiš can choose from a wide variety of possible coalition partners that might not be too fussy if he tried to dismantle parts of the democratic system—as he almost certainly would, if only to escape the corruption charges that are hanging over his head.

If Babiš does become prime minister, he could change the country in fundamental ways. Unlike proto-populists like Vaclav Klaus, a euroskeptic conservative who once held the country’s presidency, a largely ceremonial post, Babiš is highly hostile to independent institutions in Prague as well as Brussels. And unlike populists who came to power with a plurality of the vote in other countries, his ability to influence the political slant of the main state broadcaster will, in conjunction with his private holdings, give him a near-monopoly over the country’s mass media. Though Babiš would undoubtedly face determined opposition from large segments of the population, it may prove rather more difficult to check his thirst for power than observers enthralled by Prague’s chic cafes believe.

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Politico: Unity of Central Europe’s Visegrad Group under strain

They may well be still here but they don’t all seem to be in the same place politically. Even the lineup for Thursday’s gathering suggested as much. It was billed as a foreign ministers’ meeting — but, of the Visegrad countries, only Poland and Hungary had foreign ministers present. Slovakia and the Czech Republic sent state secretaries. [...]

The Czech Republic is planning to request observer status at meetings of eurozone finance ministers. Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said a couple of weeks ago that the “fundamentals” of his policy were being “close to the [EU] core, close to France, to Germany.” [...]

Petr Ježek, a Czech member of the European Parliament representing the centrist ANO movement, which leads in opinion polls ahead of a general election in October, said the Visegrad Group was a “useful format for regional cooperation” in the long term. But, he added, “I’m afraid that the government in Poland and to some extent the one in Hungary are not the ones one should team up with too much.” [...]

“Visegrad is not the only pillar on which the Czech Republic builds its Central European policy,” said Tomas Kafka, director of the Central Europe Department at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing the country’s strategic dialogue with Germany and its so-called “Slavkov cooperation” with Slovakia and Austria.

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Politico: Czech president fires finance minister, ending political crisis

Czech President Miloš Zeman on Wednesday fired his controversial finance minister, Andrej Babiš, putting an end to a government crisis that threatened to shatter the ruling coalition government just months before scheduled legislative elections. [...]

Zeman acted nearly two weeks after Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka demanded that the president sack Babiš, whom he accused of tax evasion and other financial improprieties. After seemingly incriminating audio tapes were posted on the internet, Babiš was also accused of trying to manipulate the news in the two national dailies he owns through a trust. [...]

Pilný is a member of Babiš’s ANO party, which rules in a three-party coalition with Sobotka’s Social Democrats and the centrist Christian Democrats. He is widely regarded as something of a political maverick and is not seen as being close to his predecessor and party chairman. He was the head of Microsoft’s Czech operations in the 1990s and, until his promotion to minister, chairman of the economic affairs committee in the lower house of parliament.

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Politico: Czech finance minister ready to take one for the team

But Babiš, who spoke in English and French, said he would allow Zeman to fire him on one condition: that Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka accepts that his replacement will be someone from Babiš’s centrist ANO party.

Sobotka, the head of the Social Democrat party, and a majority of Czech parliamentary deputies have demanded that the president sack Babiš because of allegations of financial improprieties, including that he benefited illegally from a 2012 purchase of tax-exempt bonds issued by his conglomerate Agrofert, the source of his wealth. Babiš denies these allegations. [...]

Babiš has also faced allegations of conflict of interest involving his wide business interests and the use of EU funds for his firms during his time as finance minister. In January, the Czech parliament passed a law banning government ministers from owning media firms and more than a quarter of any company bidding for state contracts or receiving EU subsidies. A few weeks later, Babiš placed all his business holdings into a trust. [...]

In three audio recordings posted on the Internet, Babiš can be heard insulting other ministers and apparently discussing the planting of news stories that would be damaging to Interior Minister Milan Chovanec and Minister of Health Miloslav Ludvík, both members of Sobotka’s Social Democratic party. In the latest recording, a journalist from Mlada fronta Dnes is heard offering to publish information from an ongoing police investigation and discussing with Babiš the timing of the proposed leak.

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