Právo: Czech polls' result puts right overdone warnings, forecasts

Prague, Oct 22 (CTK) - The second round of the Czech Senate polls showed that those warning against the rise of the Communists (KSCM) and the decline of the Social Democrats (CSSD) were wrong, as were those who played down the troubles tormenting the right, Jiri Pehe writes in daily Pravo Monday.

The media's hysterical reaction to the junior opposition KSCM's success in the October 12-13 first election round and the simultaneous elections to the regional assemblies was inappropriate, as were their catastrophic political forecasts in this respect, Pehe writes.

The KSCM's failure in the second round this weekend did not confirm the media's previous alarmed reports about a "red dawn" in the Czech Republic.

Of course, the KSCM's failure can be partly blamed on the two-round majority system of Senate elections that considerably lowers the chances of parties that are widely viewed as "non-systemic," Pehe writes.

However, in the regional polls, the KSCM owes its success to being the only major opposition party in a situation where the right-wing parties are unsuccessfully governing on the national level and the CSSD, scandal-ridden, is in control of the self-rule regions, Pehe writes.

Many consider the KSCM's rise a moral problem, but still the KSCM, which poses no threat to democracy now, has again played a useful "sanitary" role by collecting also the votes that would otherwise go to extreme-right parties, Pehe writes.

The democrat-minded critics, horrified by the KSCM's success, should try to answer the question of whom they would support if a Communist candidate faced a rival from the Workers' Party of Social Justice (DSSS) in the second round of Senate polls, Pehe writes.

The ultra-right DSSS is a successor of the Workers' Party (DS) which was banned by court in 2010 as a xenophobic entity linked to neo-Nazism and posing a threat to democracy.

The election outcome has also shown that the CSSD, whose internal turbulences some political analysts depicted as comparable with the Civic Democrats' (ODS), does not fare that poorly. True, both the mainstream ODS and the CSSD see their position weaken, but the CSSD's decline is not so striking, Pehe writes.

It is not surprising that the CSSD, which won in all regions in the previous regional polls in 2008, has lost a portion of voters after four years of regional rule. Nevertheless, the CSSD's fresh victory in ten of 13 regions and the win of 13 senatorial seats out of 27 contested is far from a defeat, Pehe points out.

Along with exaggerated warnings and gloomy prophecies linked to the KSCM and the CSSD, the media have underestimated the crisis of the right wing, mainly the senior ruling ODS, Pehe continues.

The second round of the Senate polls, in which the ODS gained only four seats, has not only confirmed a sharp decline of the right-wing government coalition parties, but mainly shown that neither the ODS nor its conservative junior ally, TOP 09, are capable of stopping their continuing decline, Pehe writes.

At its national congress in early November, the ODS actually cannot do anything to improve the situation. If Prime Minister Petr Necas kept afloat as ODS chairman, in spite of a rebelling faction of his opponents, it would be a "politically ailing Necas," Pehe writes.

If the rebels prevailed, the ODS would definitively become controlled by politicians linked to opaque interests. Moreover, it would start to be indirectly manipulated by Vaclav Klaus, the outgoing president and a politician whom only few consider pro-reform now, Pehe writes.

In reaction to the ODS's election flop, Necas argued that government parties that introduce necessary reforms always fail in [Senate, regional, local or EU] elections halfway the government's election period. The ODS rebels, trusted by no one, on their part speak about the need for the ODS to return to genuine right-wing policies, Pehe writes.

The ODS could pull together, partly at least, if it refrained from such rhetoric. Instead, it should consider, for example, why its only victory in the regional elections was scored by Jiri Pospisil, whom Necas sacked as justice minister this summer, after top ODS representatives got nervous at the Pospisil-sponsored process of cleaning the Czech judiciary, Pehe writes.

The ODS won only in one of the 13 regions, Plzen, west Bohemia, where Pospisil was its election leader.

The ODS, however, is incapable of such self-reflection. That is why its election debacle will not help it pull together but it will probably remain only a memento and the party's wasted chance of stopping its own decline, Pehe writes.

The decline of not only the ODS but the whole democratic right is taking so large dimensions that it threatens to completely delete the right from the political map, Pehe concludes.