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Other parties are conspicous by their billboard absence. I saw only one Christian Democrat billboard during the whole of my recent trip to the CR – the party is probably in disarray and/or out of cash – and none for the Civic Democrats, (ODS) although this seems to be a deliberate strategy to hold fire until the final two weeks of the campaign and rely on press advertising telling voters that the Social Democrats will hand their money to scroungers (picture of some muscular and rough looking bloke in a pub – presumably during the daytime). ODS have run a load of anonymous billboards satirising the Social Democrats’ big welfare message more overtly (‘Paroubek: I will abolish vets’ fees’, ‘ČSSD: we oppose getting up early in the morning’).
The Social Democrats have responded in kind with some still more blunt negative advertising showing various ODS leaders under the banner ‘Don’t blame us, you voted for us’ and one of ODS’s stand-in leader Petr Nečas proclaiming ‘We don’t care less about ordinary people: Charges for visiting the doctor will simply happen’. Going negative in the CR lacks a certain lightness of touch and element of humour, but I dare say it is effective.
And, how are things going in the Czech campaign? So far Social Democrats are comfortably ahead in the polls and look on course to emerge as largest pary (probably not gaining (m)any seats) and set for a minority government backed by the Communists with occasional deal making smaller parties of the centre and centre-right to get through some of the stuff the Communists won’t wear. Petr Nečas, performed better than expected in TV head-to-head with Social Democrat leader Jiří Paroubek – despite a somewhat cerebral geekish image, he was confident, to the point and able throw in a few sound bites, although was Paroubek better at hammering home basic messages likely to be understood and remembered by voters in their living rooms – but he seems unlikely to be a game changer.
The 64,000 crown question is, however, whether such left-right co-operation would extend to some of the more painful fiscal measures and rowing back from campaign promises – and certainly from he tone of the campaign – likely to be necessary in government. Paroubek, despite having built his political success in the last four years on being a bruising populist, made his early career as moderate and has plenty of experiences working with the right in Prague politics, so I suspect, in reality, he probably has a shrewd appreciation not only of how to win elections but also of what can and (more to the point) what cannot be delivered when they have been won.
>So in the end, Czech Civic Democrat leader Miroslav Topolánek met the same fate as the hands of his more illustrious predecessor Václav Klaus – booted out by regions for electoral failure. Only this being Topolánek it more clumsy, disasterous and bathetic than the elegant failures and climdowns that mark the lower points of Mr Klaus’s career. While Klaus has the good sense to read the runes and step down in 2002, the maladroit Topolánek suffered the indignity of a massive vote against him in the ODS executive summarily removing him from the top of the party’s South Moravian list and role as the party’s national ‘electoral leader’ for the campaign. And, of course, Topolánek has been ousted weeks before an election not weeks after one – an impressive act of collective political courage (or desperation) by ODS intended to stem the party’s slide in the polls and loss of support to small new pro-reform parties.
What ever the truth of, it’s appearances that count in politics. – and frankly what kind of an idiot politically would launch into any kind of off-the-cuff remarks about the Jewish background. Well, Topolánek that’s who.
Such anti-charisma is being plugged by some Czech political pundits as likely to blunt the electoral attacks of both like TOP09 alternative right-wing parties and the Social Democrats both of whom were to some extent running against Topolánek, although the Social Democrats’ big welfare/big stimulus message seems likely to play well whoever leads ODS and I personally am sceptical that a bet on John Major-like dullness will pay off, a fact Necas himself seems to have grasped by trying to show his macho side, telling us that sometimes he does lose his temper and threatening to pull ODS nominated ministers out of the caretaker technocrat government in last few pre-election weeks.
A political obituary for Topolánek? He’s the man who held ODS post-Klaus, defined belatedly and for a more pragmatic, ecologically-minded realistic pro-market centre-right politics in the CR; and saw off Klaus and got the Lisbon Treaty ratified by the Czech parliament. A more substantive and interesting political figure than the gaffes, vulgar slips, lack of media polish, messy personal life for which he is likely to be remember. His greatest political failure was not to be an electoral winner in 2006, not to hold his minority government together in the spotlight of the EU Presidency. The greatest bit of bad luck of this famously lucky politican was the postponement of the scheduled early election of 2009 by the Czech Constitutional Court. After this Topolánek’s judgement and taste for politics seem to have deserted him, until he was mowed down by his own party.
You wonder, however, if any leader of ODS can ever really win an election in a meaningful sense ever again. After all every Czech elections since 1996 has seen the Social Democrats do better than expected, either by winning or do better than expected in defeat. Why should 2010 be any different?
And what one wonder would electoral defeat presage for the now very diverse Czech centre-right?
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Like a lot of politics lecturers, I know, while it fascinates me, the the whole me good/you bad bullshit world of partisan politics also rather appals.
For the first time in very a long while, I almost feel glad to be an academic…
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My co-author, Tim Bale, is also author of new book on the British Tories, which he describes here in a podcast on the Bookhugger site. I had a small enabling role here, as it was recording in my office: a fact obvious by default for anyone who knows it in that Tim is seated in front of the only area not cluttered with untidy piles of books, papers and coffee cups: the space-age window-cum-porthole which sometimes leaves me feeling more like Major Tom than Dr Sean.
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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)
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.
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