Reflex: Czechs have not changed their voting habits since 1992

Prague, Oct 18 (CTK) - Czech media claim voters returned nostalgically to the Communists (KSCM) in the recent regional elections, but this is not true at all because Czechs have practically not changed their voting manners since 1992, Bohumil Pecinka writes in weekly Reflex out yesterday.

The Communists scored an unprecedented success in the elections in which they won in two regions. The Social Democrats (CSSD) who ruled in all 13 regions in the past four years, defended nine regions, and the senior government Civic Democrat (ODS) and the Mayors for the Liberec Region won each in one.

Pecinka writes that in spite of the first interpretations all media carried, no radical turn to the left occurred in the Czech Republic.

He writes that Czech voters take a typically conservative attitude to elections. The camps of the right and left whose size is about the same have been created in the country in the course of years and relatively few voters switch allegiance.

The current period context is decisive for the voters' decision-making. In 1992 the left was fragmented and the right profited from this. Another time, in 1998, for instance, the right was squabling and the left scored, Pecinka writes.

One time the opposition right takes the protest votes like in 2004 and four years later the two camps swap their positions. Sometimes the two blocs score a draw like in 2006, Pecinka writes.

However, it has never happened that voters from one camp would be leaving for the other en mass and so rewrite the political map of the Czech Republic. This did not even happen this time, though it cannot be ruled out in the future, Pecinka writes.

He writes that turnout is a key to this year's elections.

In the 2010 general election, when 63 percent of eligible voters came to the polls, the Communists won 590,000 votes. In the regional election this year (37 turnout), the Communists won 540,000 votes (elections were not held in Prague unlike in the general elections), and they practically only dusted off their hard voter core, Pecinka writes.

He says it applies that the lower turnout, the bigger election gains the Communists have.

Those who did not go to the polls this time or cast protest votes for various non-party movements, were the traditional right voters, who wre disorientated or disgusted by the government policy and scandals on all levels, Pecinka writes.

The voters of the left camp are primarily interested in the redistribution of public money and social transfers of all kind. If their political representation secures this for them, they are capable of generously overlooking even large-scale corruption, Pecinka writes.

He writes that Bohuslav Sobotka is to blame for the CSSD's loss of 75 seats in regional assemblies compared with 2008.

Sobotka was so frequently and loudly persuading the public that his voters wish regional coalitions with Communists until he persuaded them that they need not be ashamed of casting their vote for the KSCM, Pecinka writes.

As a result the Communists received 68 seats more than four years ago, he adds.

Another trend of this year's elections was the unstoppable flight from the established political parties like in the general election in 2010, when the CSSD lost 10 percent of the vote and the ODS even 15 percent, Pecinka writes.

In the regional elections, the two parties lost about one third of their mandates, he writes.

This testifies to that the large parties behave like sects and are unable to integrate conflicting social interests that start to be organised outside the framework of political parties, Pecinka writes.

Unless the classical political parties recover, the fate of the developments in the Liberec Region, where the party system has completely collapsed and non-party groupings have gained the upper hand, may repeat on the national level, Pecinka writes.

He says the country would return to the year 1990 when the first programme-anchored parties were born out from large and illegible movements that played a role in the dismantling of the communist regime in end-1989.