Prague, March 14 (CTK) – Some of the recipes for avoiding the Slovak election surprise, or the success of the far right extremists of Marian Kotleba, in the Czech Republic include the maintenance of the most open education and investment in teachers, Erik Tabery writes in weekly Respekt out yesterday.
He writes that Czechs reacted to the Slovak election result asking whether the Slovaks did not know what was happening in their country, as if the Czechs were convinced that they know well what can be expected in their own country. But is this really so? Tabery asks.
He writes that every country has its own specificities that do not allow simple comparisons.
Just as it would be nonsensical to expect Czechs to be like Britons if they introduced the majority election system, or that direct democracy would turn them into Swiss. There are also big differences between the Czechs and Slovaks, Tabery writes.
One of the differences between the Czech Republic and its neighbour, the Slovak Republic, is that the former never had a strong fascist party.
This complicates the situation of the present-day brownish extremists because unlike the Slovak, they cannot work with historical roots, Tabery writes.
The Slovaks practically do not have any communists (the communists did not win in Slovakia even in 1946, when they won in the Czech Lands), while the situation is just the opposite in the Czech Republic, Tabery writes.
The Czech society also has a relatively strong urban population where the middle class lives. A number of towns are no backward relatives of the capital city, but sovereign cultural and intellectual centres that are growing rich at first sight, Tabery writes.
As a result, with some exceptions, there do not exist any larger localities that would be totally socially underprivileged, even though there are naturally richer and poorer regions and life in some is more than difficult, Tabery writes.
But the situation is not that dramatically imbalanced like in Slovakia, or also in Poland and Hungary, he adds.
Tabery writes that it shows how important it was that the total destruction of the social system (which is not extremely generous in addition) has never been pushed through and if a government went too far, its successor remedied it.
A democratic society requires operable institutions. The condition of Slovak education, health care and the judiciary arouses people’s mistrust of their own state and their politicians’ ability to deal with problems, Tabery writes.
Tabery writes that the outcome of the Slovak election can be blamed on social depression, which extremists of various kind can successfully make use of.
Unless the Czechs want to experience the Slovak election surprise, they should not only focus on the level of education and independent institutions, including those with the “control” role such as the media, but they should also realise the importance of civic society and the attention paid to the socially weakest people, Tabery writes.
As soon as these people fall through the rescue network, they end up in the embrace of extremists who will offer them an opportunity to take their revenge on those who forgot about them, Tabery writes.
