The emotions that the current governmental crisis evokes for me and my generation are mostly very negative. We are disenchanted, we are losing some of our illusions, some of our securities. All this, however, does not necessarily have to be bad for us. At least not as long as we are capable of abandoning personal sympathies and antipathies and we manage to rationally analyse the situation and maybe learn a lesson for the future.
We are a generation that does not remember anything from the times of the communist totalitarianism; we feel to be Europeans (this does not mean we don’t feel to be Czechs as well), and despite a well-developed social perception, we support a great deal of freedom connected with a great deal of responsibility. And it is unnecessary to interest ourselves too deeply in politics to see rather clear political preferences. Thus, for us, the current (outgoing) government was the best or at least the least bad of the possible solutions. To see how the current turn is perceived all you need to do is visit Facebook and read the statuses of my contemporaries. Many of them are quite outspoken in the way they comment, more or less funnily, on the behaviour of the opposition and the coalition MPs that sank the government. I quite understand them, even though, I personally try to keep a certain decorum. We expect what is to come with a certain worry. We suffer from Havel’s “bad mood”.
Sit down comfortably
The sharply confrontational style adopted by the ČSSD leader and others, previously rather moderate politicians like Bohuslav Sobotka, causes nausea among us. And we find the fact that many voters react positively to it somewhat terrifying. We are terrified that they are willing to accept a game, in which the CZK 30 medical fees try to appear as a significant political matter. Why do politics became enslaved by voter preferences? We identify with Ivan Medek’s words in a January interview for Lidové noviny: “Politics cannot be done according to what people think. A politician is responsible for the society…” We want to talk about topics that are going to be important for a long time, like the construction of a US radar in Brdy, the Lisbon Treaty, euro adoption, as well as pension, healthcare and university reform. Not about artificially created problems. We do not refuse constructive opposition and a dialogue with them. However, we are looking for such an opposition in vain here in the Czech Republic. It is not surprising that many young people are becoming disgusted with politics.
Hopefully, nothing is lost yet. It is just the Czech democracy, which is as we are, undergoing a symbolic final exam – “a test of maturity” in the form of this governmental crisis. The exam should transfer it further into the university environment. It is, however, a little sad that we will have no influence, except for voting right and some civil initiative, on how this exam will be passed. We have to learn to put up with it since we are no idealists and we shy away from the idea of radical solutions. The best is to sit down comfortably and watch the political-constitutional development unravel in the Czech Republic as an entertaining, but also an educational film.
Tomáš Jungwirth (born in 1988) comes from Prague where he went to Gymnázium Jana Keplera secondary school. He currently studies at the Law Faculty of Charles University.
