Prague, Nov 24 (CTK) – Czech political scientist Petr Robejsek, 67, has founded a rightist conservative party, the Realists, with which he would like to gain 20 percent of the vote in the October 2017 general election, he told reporters on Thursday.
The party wants to defend the family, security and national interests, he added.
The party will present its detailed programme in the spring. It will also decide by then whether it will field its own candidate in the 2018 direct presidential election.
The Realists filed an application for registration with the Interior Ministry on Thursday.
The party wants to present its stances to the public in the following two months. As of January, it will open to new members.
“We will present a very concrete political programme for the general election and we suppose we will enter the Chamber of Deputies in the autumn. The party chairperson will be elected in February or March,” Robejsek said.
So far he has headed the party as a mentor who is drafting its programme goals. He said he was not likely to run for its leader.
Robejsek has estimated the new party’ election potential at 20 percent.
He said he would like to attract the voters who had not yet found a right-wing party to identify with and address the disappointed voters of right-wing parties and the ANO movement of billionaire businessman Andrej Babis as well. ANO is moving more to the left, he added.
The new party wants to gain finances for its election campaign from sponsors’ gifts that it will start accepting after the registration.
“We will certainly welcome sponsors from among businesspeople and quite big firms. However, we always want them to identify with our philosophy,” said Jiri Hynek, president of the Defence and Security Industry Association (DSIA), who has assisted in the party’s establishment.
Robejsek denied the information by the Echo.cz server saying the Penta group, whose co-owner Marek Dospiva supported his Institute 2080 think tank, was behind the party. Robejsek left the institute’s board on Wednesday.
Penta spokesman Ivo Mravinac told CTK that Dospiva did not rule out his possible financial support for the Realists from his private sources. However, Dospiva does not intend to enter politics, Mravinac added.
Apart from Robejsek and Hynek, economist Pavel Kohout, Alexander Kiraly, deputy dean of the Mining and Geological Faculty of the Technical University in Ostrava, north Moravia, and Jiri Horecky, president of the Union of Employees’ Organisations, have joined the Realists.
Robejsek studied sociology in Prague. In 1975 he left the communist Czechoslovakia for West Germany. He worked with the International Institute for Politics and Economics in Hamburg that he headed in 1998-2007.
Robejsek has long been critical of the European Union (EU). President Milos Zeman awarded him a medal of merit this year.
The Respekt weekly reported in 2003 that Robejsek had cribbed parts of a text by German political scientist Gregor Walter from the ZIB magazine for international relations in his article in an anthology on globalisation from 2000, without citing the source. Robejsek defended himself, saying the text was copied by a student searching data for his article and that he felt deceived by this student.
