Prague, Jan 7 (CTK) – Czech President Milos Zeman and Finance Minister Andrej Babis (ANO) are connected by the fact that strata with which they have nothing in common have accepted them as their representatives, political scientist Stanislav Balik told the latest issue of weekly Reflex out yesterday.
He said Zeman, 71, is a typical middle-class intellectual without any ties with people doing manual work in the country and small towns, yet “god-forgotten” areas consider him their president, Balik said.
Billionaire businessman Babis, 61, has moved in an entirely different environment since his youth and he is one of the symbols of the 1990s which his voters consider a period during which the national wealth was plundered, yet they are looking up to him, Balik said.
He said these two politicians will dominate Czech politics for some time to come, but added that nothing lasts for ever.
Turning to the fact that a continuous political campaign starts this year with the autumn regional and Senate elections and will continue until 2027 when no election will be held, Balik said this is good neither for voters nor democracy.
He said this is one of the most serious systemic problems of Czech democracy. In 1995, the Czechs only chose two institutions in direct elections – the Chamber of Deputies and local self-rule authorities, while now, there are six such institutions.
The new ones are the regional self-rule bodies, the Senate, the president and the European Parliament. What is more, the elections are held at different times.
Balik said this has caused that elections are no longer a moment of a fundamental clash of ideas, but they are a common, if not bothersome affair.
People cease to feel that their voting changed nothing. However, this is not only a problem of multiple elections, but also of the restriction of the space for governance by extending the powers of transnational structures such as the European Union.
This could be remedied if elections were not held too frequently and if people were choosing directly only such bodies that distinctly influence their lives and with whose election they can change something, Balik said.
He said voters in their majority discern well the influence and weight of the elected bodies and that is why they ignore the elections to the European Parliament or the Senate.
Asked whether the competition of the right and left will survive, Balik said he is not sure.
He said it seems that a predominant majority of Czechs accepts a strong etatism, where the state helps, ensures and guarantees many things.
This naturally weakens the liberal right and opens space to other forces that are not based on customary socio-economic themes. Until this continues, there will not be too many opportunities to revive the mainstream parties, but on the contrary, one-off political groupings will be emerging and disappearing, Balik said.
Asked whether the rightist Civic Democratic Party (ODS), a former government, now opposition party, has a chance of revival, he said it has, but not everything depends on it alone.
Balik said the ODS´s problem did not start only with the scandal of former prime minister Petr Necas and [his mistress] Jana Nagyova, which brought down the rightist coalition government in June 2013.
The ODS’s problem started before the 2006 general election when the party aroused hopes that it was unable to fulfil. The presentation and political timing of individual steps was even worse than the content itself, Balik said.
He said the ODS also pays for the big concessions it made within the government coalition. It is held responsible for things that it was opposed to, such as the raising of taxes.
If this combines with the party´s ties with suspicious economic-political figures, the ODS’s problem was really deep and it cannot be resolved within one four-year election term, Balik said.
He added, however, that the local level has shown that the party can be successful where it is represented by trustworthy people.
Balik said it is strange that almost no one comments on the continuous balancing of the junior government Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) along the 5 percent parliamentary barrier in public opinion polls.
He said the KDU-CSL may share the fate of all smallest government coalition parties since 1996. They paid for the sins of their stronger partners, Balik said.
Turning to the conservative opposition TOP 09, he said it faces the test of truth that will show to what degree it is an artificial product similar to Babis´s ANO movement and to what degree it is a common political party.
Balik said the circumstances are even more unfavourable for it than they are for the ODS. It has lost a charismatic chairman [Karel Schwarzenberg who did not seek re-election last December], it is not embedded on the local and regional levels, it advocates European integration that is not currently popular.
In addition, it is probably making a mistake when it resorts to a strong resistance to the electronic registration of sales pushed through by Babis and generally to the resentment against Babis, Balik said.
He said this makes it one-theme party. What is more, this theme is not strongly connected with the interests of its voter core.
