Bratislava, April 23 (CTK) – The Czech Communists (KSCM), which gained the worst result in history in the last October general election, paradoxically stand closest to power since the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1989, Slovak daily Sme wrote on Monday.
It comments on the nascent minority coalition government of the election-winning ANO movement of Andrej Babis and the Social Democrats (CSSD) that is to be kept afloat by the Communists.
The Czech Communists are neither a dangerous party of the 1950s, nor the enthusiasts from the post-war era who believed that only the Soviet Union could bring the liberation from the Nazis.
The current Communists are those of the normalisation era, Sme writes, referring to the restoring the hard-line communist rule in the 1970s after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.
“Outwardly, they are preaching revolution, provoking nostalgia for the previous regime among its voters, who had no freedoms but had pseudo-certainties then, and they are courting Russia, Syria and North Korea. However, inside, their revolutionary enthusiasm has already evaporated and they care for keeping power. They will conform themselves to keep their cosy seats in parliament and maybe even get some state administration posts,” Sme writes.
All of a sudden, the Communists do not insist on the country’s departure from NATO and the EU.
In the modern history of Czech parliamentarism, the Communists played the role of the party with which no one counted for a government, but with which it was possible to make agreement from time to time, Sme writes.
It adds that the KSCM as a party avowing dictatorship should have been dissolved, and if it entered parliament after all, no decent politicians should negotiate with it.
“Decency cannot be expected from Babis, he is pursuing power and has forgotten his assurance that he would not base his government on the Communists,” Sme notes.
The fact that the oldest democratic party in the Czech Republic, the CSSD, considers a criminally prosecuted prime minister (Babis) a problem, but does not mind support by admirers of dictatorship is sad, the paper concludes.
