Prague, July 20 (CTK) – People’s fears of refugees do not only bring points to the extremists shouting anti-migration slogans in squares, but also the Czech parliamentary opposition, particularly the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), profits from them, Lukas Jelinek writes in daily Pravo yesterday.
He writes that the ODS, a former government party, rejects Finance Minister Andrej Babis’s (ANO) drive to introduce the electronic registration of sales and it does not conceal its opinion that the ill-disciplined Greeks should be sent out from euro zone.
The ODS could also profit from people’s resentment against the current wave of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East and criticism of the government whose policy on the issue it considers too soft, Jelinek writes.
He writes that in its anti-migration rhetoric, the ODS even sometimes forgets about that it likes to scare people with European integration.
“We must change the return policy: it cannot be done on the basis of national states, we all must reach agreement within Europe,” Jelinek quotes ODS chairman Petr Fiala as saying in an interview with Pravo.
Jelinek writes that Fiala is right. If every country plays for itself, it will maximally push the problem a couple of hundreds of kilometres away from its border.
But if the EU had a common migration policy, its action would be much more effective. However, Czech parties have been opposed to it for some unknown reasons to date, Jelinek writes.
In his criticism of immigrants, which many citizens may like, Fiala argues with something that, on the contrary, can strip the party of votes.
“We must reduce the attractiveness of the European welfare state,” Fiala says when speaking about the immigrants’ desire to participate in Europe’s welfare, Jelinek writes.
The lowering of the attractiveness of welfare state would, however, affect all Czechs, particularly the most vulnerable groups, such as pensioners, young families with small children, single mothers, the unemployed and people living on the brink of poverty, Jelinek writes.
He writes that to make welfare state less attractive, the living conditions would have to be close those in the north of Africa or in the Middle East.
The ODS’s founder, former president Vaclav Klaus, also promoted the lowering of social, health care and environment standards of the European Union some years ago, and Fiala likes to compare himself with Klaus. But a common Czech inhabitant remembers Klaus as a dogmatic ideologist, who liked to provoke, particularly abroad, Jelinek writes.
At home, he won “fame” during the post-communist economic transformation, within which state property was privatised before the relevant legislation was passed, Jelinek writes.
He writes that he would expect Fiala, a political scientist by training, to pursue a more sophisticated strategy, the more so that he cannot offer Klaus’s charisma that fascinated the public for a few years.
If the Civic Democrats wanted to again cross the 10 percent level of voter support what Fiala hopes for, they should target a bigger portion of voters than only those who do not care about the European welfare state, Jelinek writes.
ms/t/hol
