So what going on? Alas, as a little judicious underlining of the
Respekt profile by Ondřej Kundra makes clear, there is little mystery in Mr Fischer’s seemingly unlikely political stardom and the magazine pretty much answers its own questions even before it has asked them.
As Respekt flatteringly notes, Fischer
“… has none of the usual arrogance of political bigwigs (papalášské projevy) taking the form of insulting journalists and political opponents, speeding madly through red traffic lights with sirens on, or opulent holidaying with lobbyists (s lobbisty) [something of a dirty word in Czech, lobbista]. And his personal life too has not changed since he left the Statistical Office to take up the post of Prime Minister. In fact, his life hardly differs from that of the ordinary Czech (běžného Čecha)
Every morning he goes out of his high-rise flat to walk the dog, and when his packed schedule allows, relaxes by taking weekend walks with his second wife Dana in the Krkonoš Mountains. He enjoys reading (his favourite authors are Karel Poláček and Isaac Bashevis Singer) and has for years regularly driven to have lunch and his favour patisseries in an ordinary (řadové) restaurants in a small, Central Bohemian town near to where he owns a small holiday cottage (chalupu)”
We also learn that he’s very goal oriented and has learned good English
In other words, Mr Fischer is, or appears to be, ordinary, decent (I am thinking of the Czech word slušný here) person and a non-politician with a modest lifestyle of a ‘typical’ Czech: hard-working and desire to educate himself still further; high-rise living in communist-era flats; a dog (no doubt a dachshund) ; safe, rather middle brow literary tastes; cheap, unpretentious pub meals and a sweet tooth; and a liking for healthy outdoor pursuits not too far afield from the family chata or chalupa (roughly the Czech equivalent of the Russian datcha).
You’ve heard of Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
Well, this is a sort of Mr Novák Goes To Prague.
For me – however, worthy, dull and ordinary Mr Fischer may actually be – this rings hollow. Indeed it smacks of cliché. The same rather fawning pen portraits of the unremarkable but honest Czech official cataputled to high political office can be found in the early 1990s describing Václav Klaus who, let us remember, also had a powerful work ethic, lived in a high rise flat , learnt good English and enjoyed hiking. The reference to the small town Bohemia is also rather archetypical. Admittedly, the CR is a country whose pattern of settlement is characterised by a predomince of small and medium towns. But the small-medium sized town iand its values are in many ways the ‘typical’, ster eotypical Czech community that you can see snow covered on a dozens of Czech Christmas and New Year cards. Not for nothing did Karel Poláček use the okresní město (‘county town’) to depict Czech society in microcosm.
As different elements of the profile makes clear, Mr Fischer is, in fact, probably, like Mr Klaus, a more complex, unusual and interesting character than the dull Everyman evoked above. He is, for example, not only the Czech Republic’s first Jewish Prime Minister – no big deal in the CR except for various nutcases on the neo-Nazi fringe – but also the first PM seriously to practice or profess any religious faith. He is also someone very much part of the Czech administrative elite: a well paid, well connected civil servant close the heart of government for years – indeed, the only highly placed official to regularly attend cabinet meetings – and, of course, someone whose early career begins in the late communist era and includes the obligatory Communist Party card.
The profile has, however, hit on a deeper truth. This is (sometimes) how many Czech would like their rulers to be: technocratic, dull, like them and apolitical, at least in the sense of being non-party or non-partisan.
So it is actually this more Dr Novák Goes to Prague or Engineer Novák Goes to Prague as Czechs in their anti-political fantasy lives – stoked to a high degree by much of the country’s intellectual discourse – would reallly to be rescued by well qualified ordinary technocrat rather than a completely average (wo)man in the street.
And, in fairness, both the writer and Mr Fischer himself clearly realize that the current caretaker PM’s political superstar-dom is the Czech public’s latest fling with anti-political intellectual populism seeking temporary respite in government thinkers, artists, technocrats and aristocrats
As both note Mr Fischer does not need to put together a programme beyond that of ‘normal admionistration’ of the state; run a party, contest elections, broker coalitions and trade-off all the multiple demands these throw up. No wonder he can remain calm and civil and avoid slagging off political opponents in emotive, overblown rhetoric.
Happily, Mr Fischer ain’t no Fujimori in the making and seems perfecti;y aware that he is riding the crest of the latest anti-political wave and will soon need to step down and walk away into the sunset, noting that
‘People in my position must be under political control, must – in short – emerge from voting by the public. Because there is always the rise that a populist could emerge, who could start to abuse this position, build up in own position on it. That’s unacceptable. A bad signal for democracy’
Indeed. Perhaps more worrying is the sneaking suspicion that many Czech voters wouldn’t actually be at all that bothered if their country took a few years off politics to be run on liberal lines by a committee of upright but approachable technocrats – a sort of Central European Hong Kong. Perhaps as a province in the liberal-market Mitteleuropa run from Vienna by a caste of solid (unelected) Habsburg-schooled administrators, which Hayek and von Mises projected in 1940s.
Lidovci příliš nezáří ani na jihu Moravy – ve své tradiční baště reports ČT24, the Czech CNN (as if). Translated this means that the Czech Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL) are – according to regional polling – down to a grim six percent even in their historic bastion of South Moravia. They polled 11% of the vote there in 2006 election but nationally only just made it over the 5% threshold, this poll suggests their electoral support may be halved and, come parliamentary elections at the end of next month, they will go the way of the Hungarian KNDP and other small Christian parties in CEE – down the electoral plughole. With mass organization, tradition and some deeply embedded support in Catholic regions, they couldn’t totally be written off even as an extra-parliamentary party, but like the KNDP in the end they will end up simply as a building bloc for other alliance. Bad news for the Czech right in the short-term: if KDU-ČSL flops so do their slim chances of a parliamentary majority, but their demise would exactly not great news for the Social Democrats either, wiping from the political map a moderate, stable, pro-European grouping with a genuine commitment to a social market, leaving them more reliant than they might like to be. The culprits are, of course, the new TOP09 party headed up by Habel confidante Prince Karel Schwarzenberg and various, pragmatic pro-market Christian Democrat defectors such as Miroslav Kalousek. In the end, they might I guess find their way into the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) creating a broader based right – TOP09 is almost unashamedly openly a short-term vehicle and ODS current stand-in leader Petr Nečas is a practicing Catholic who can do social conservatism. If, of course, ODS does not desend into factional conflict there is a Civic Democatic Party left for them to make their way into. I suppose they will just have to wait for Václav Klaus to descend from the heavens (or at least the battlements of Prague Castle) and save them.
