Lofty reform ambitions won't insulate Czech right, says Respekt

Council contractors are due to put in 30cm of subsidized insulation in our roof space later this week and father-in-law has come over from the Czech Republic. His idea of a family visit and a bit of help clearing the loft is it turns out is buying a job lot of timber and immediately setting to work raising the joists. "You'll need a team of chippies for that, guv, don't bother" the guy from the insulation firm had told me, but what's that to an active pensioner from a country famed for its 'golden hands'. And, as my wife points out, as I can hardly hammer a nail in straight who am I to object?

Between listening to a story about a Moravian relative who bought a pub in the 1990s and discovered valuable porcelain hidden under the floorboard - unclear, apparently, if it was secreted there by ‘transferred’ Sudeten Germans in 1945-6 or by some member of the soon to be expropriated Czech bourgeoise in the late 1940s, but valuable anyway - and some thoughts about minorities (“And just why do we have to call Gypsies Roma?”), emptying the dishwasher and keeping the kids away from dangerous carpentry equipment, I get briefly to drink some coffee and peruse the Czech news magazine Respekt.

Here Marek Švehla comments that the recent reform package passed by the minority centre-right government is less about lower or flatter taxation - not really necessary in the Czech Republic anyway even according the liberal Švehla, as investment is still rolling in with highest, uneven taxes and tax collection is efficient. He is, however, critical of the centre-right Civic Democrats for their outrageous populism claiming (pre-election and, more foolishly, with a watered down package post-election) that their planned tax and fiscal reforms would benefit everyone and produce bulging wallets all round.

Instead, says Švehla they should have focused their appeal on a nascent Czech middle class, the natural social constituency of any party of the reformist centre-right, as a group of voters able to understand that their would be a longer term payoff and weather short-term losses. Alas, the rather anaemic version of their flat tax revolution, rather clobbered the middle class and the trade-off and compromises triggered factional infighting motivated by personal animosity and vested interests in the party disguised as an ideological and policy argument. Civic Democrat leader Miroslav Topolánek has reckons Švehla, probably blown the next election. Meanwhile, sidelined ODS Finance Spokesman and political rival Vlastimil Tloustý declares himself to be a loyal, but frustrated flat tax purist in an interview with right-wing monthly Politika. Lofty ambitions.