MfD: Direct presidential election is no progress

Prague, Feb 7 (CTK) - The direct president election is not a sign of "progress" of politics, but of its deep crisis in the Czech Republic, analyst Michal Kubat writes in Mlada fronta Dnes yesterday.

The effort at implementing direct presidential elections has existed in the Czech politics for over 20 years, Kubat writes one day before the crucial Senate vote on the bill.

The effort has been coming and going, but tomorrow, this type of the Czech politics will probably wind up, he adds.

Czech president is at present elected indirectly, at joint session of both houses of the Czech parliament, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies.

There is no doubt that the Czech parliamentary system suffers from many defects. For all warnings by constitutional law experts and political scientists, Czech politicians have never started a professional discussion on the wide aspects of the working of the Czech parliamentary system in order to improve it, Kubat writes.

Instead, they have obsessively tried to push through the "saving" direct presidential election. They do not bear in mind that it will not save anyone or anything, Kubat, who lectures political science at Charles University, writes.

Perhaps there is no other gap with such a fateful impact between the views of experts and the political public in any other field, he adds.

If politicians have ever come up with any arguments, they have been repeatedly refuted by the crushing majority of analysts and constitutional lawyers, but to no avail, Kubat writes.

The Czech Republic has weak and unstable governments. However, the direct presidential election will not help any solution to the problem. If anything, it will only deepen it, he adds.

This is an old problem. Instead of an effort at resolving really existing problems, politicians pay attention to minor issues that resolve nothing and can be potentially dangerous, Kubat writes.

In the Czech Republic, there is the favourite vision of an "independent president" who is not associated with any parties, he adds.

This is a tradition going back to the beginnings of the existence of Czechoslovakia (1918), perhaps farther to the past, Kubat writes.

The direct presidential election is to bring an independent and unifying president as he is arises from a majority of voters. But this is a pure illusion, he adds.

The European political practice has clearly revealed that any electoral contest, including the presidential one, is always more or less a duel of parties, Kubat writes.

The way the president is elected has been recently also connected with political ethic in the Czech Republic, he adds.

This mainly relates to the previous, 2008 election, dogged with various behind-the-scenes machinations, Kubat writes about the poll in which President Vaclav Klaus was re-elected.

The view of lawmakers who were electing the president was really disgusting. The question is whether it is really necessary to resolve such a situation by changing the way in which the president is elected, he adds.

In fact, the way the president is elected and parliamentary ethic are two different affairs. If the lawmakers lose the presidential election, the year 2008 will never repeat, but parliamentary ethic as such will not be reprieved either, Kubat writes.

Besides, one has to ask the question of whether the attempts at manipulating parliamentary electors will be replaced with manipulations of voters such as through increasingly sophisticated political marketing techniques, he adds.

Public opinion polls demonstrably show that the general public is in favour of the direct presidential election. However, many polls have also revealed that its place in the order of priorities is relatively insignificant, Kubat writes.

In other words, if asked whether they want to have the direct presidential election, most of those polled answer in the affirmative. But if asked, what really worries them, no one cites the direct presidential election, he adds.