Czech Greens - the machine stops...

No sooner do I give the Czech Greens a clean bill of health than they again slam madly once more for the self-destruct button. Czech media (Právo, HN) have reported over the last couple of days reports the formation of a left-wing faction critical of the leadership’s top down style and ‘right-wing’ agenda given the speculation about the Greens entering coalition with the centre-right free market Civic Democrats – suggestions greeted with disgust by various right-wing commentators, who see the party in darkly conspiratorial terms as the last gasp of Havel’s Non-Political Politics – even the normally sober Bohumil Pečinka goes for this line in the recent issue of the Politika.

The new Faction has been supported publicly supported by a number of Green candidates high on the parties’ electoral lists and even has a manifesto signed by several dozen party members. There are suggestions that this is the latest tactical ploy in the Social Democrats' tough and aggressive campaign – the story of the Faction came out through journalist on the Social Democrat-inclined Právo. Some of the discontent is clearly motivated by those who have lost out in the party primaries or been removed because of the punch-up mentioned in a previous post.

Meanwhile a story linking those honest losers the “New Freedom Union” and the rather more ambitious but equally marginal Liberal Reform Party (LiRA) mentioned in a previous post. seem to have secured the services of ex-dissident, protestant pastor and Freedom Union MP Svatopluk Karásek. Obviously not put off by LiRA's rampant social liberalism (including a commitment to legalizing euthanesia) ot theologically rather dodgy promise of Heaven on Earth - or the need to give his own party a decent burial - Karásek has agreed to stand for LiRA in November’s Senate elections, which seem set to offer a financial lifeline to various liberal, ecological and pro-civil society micro-parties able to hitch with a well known candidate and win a local first-past-the-post content on the lowest of low turnout.