Prague April 9 (CTK) – Czechs continue to prefer Slovaks the most of all ethnic groups and their perception of the Vietnamese and the Chinese improved in the past year, while they most dislike Arabs and the Roma, according to a CVVM poll released on Monday.
The dislike of the Arabs and Roma has weakened in the past year though.
Apart for the Vietnamese and the Arabs, relations to particular ethnic groups do not change much with time.
Four fifths of Czechs like Slovaks, while only one percent dislikes them, followed by the Poles, with one half of Czechs being fond of them.
Concerning another six groups, the share of the respondents who like them prevail over those who do not, including the Greeks (38 percent), Jews (30 percent), Vietnamese (37 percent), Germans (34 percent), Hungarians (30 percent) and Bulgarians (25 percent).
The liking of the Vietnamese even grew and they are perceived the most positively since 2013, when the CVVM agency first enquired about it.
For Serbs, Russians, Chinese and Ukrainians, dislike prevails over liking, but the majority of assessments were neutral. One quarter of Czechs likes Russians, 22 percent like the Serbs, 21 percent like the Ukrainians and the Chinese. The perception of the latter group improved in the past year.
In the perception of Romanians, Albanians, Arabs and the Roma, dislike prevails, and 73 percent of the respondents said they disliked the Roma.
As regards Arabs, an extreme dislike for them grew in 2015-2016, which stopped in 2017, with 41 percent disliking them. In 2018, 37 percent of the respondents said they disliked them.
The attitude to the Arabs and Roma is related to the respondents’ living standard, the CCVM wrote. One half of the respondents with poor living standard dislikes the Arabs and only 34 percent of those with good living standard do so.
The pollsters also found a marked difference in the opinion on Arabs between the voters of Milos Zeman and Jiri Drahos in the January presidential election, with 45 percent of the voters of the former and 32 percent of the later candidate disliking them.
Similarly, Zeman’s voters tended to like the Russians more (35 percent) than those of Drahos (18 percent).
For comparison, the CVVM asked the respondents about their attitude to Czechs. While 86 percent see them positively, one percent dislikes them.
The poll was conducted between March 3-15 on 1,061 people aged over 15.
According to recent data of the Czech Statistical office (CSU), there were 493,400 foreigners living in the Czech Republic with 10.5 million inhabitants at the end of 2016, of whom there were 110,000 Ukrainians, 107,251 Slovaks and 58,025 Vietnamese.
The Roma are the largest ethnic minority in the country, with estimated 245,800 people contributing to almost 2.3 percent of the country’s population.
