Czech Republic: Protest and survive?

You Tube carries some unedited video from left-liberal internet daily Deník Referendum  of yesterday's large trade union organized protests by public sector workers in Prague against wage and budget cuts. At 40, 000 the numbers are the highest since protests against pension and retirement reforms in the mid-1990s, although much larger numbers took to the streets of the capital in 1999 in protest against the perceived stitching up of politics by the two big parties - now safely at each other's throats - and again in the 'Television Crisis' of 2000, when the same politicians were suspected of heavy handed interference in state TV.

Yesterday's march seems a typically well ordered Czech social protest and interestingly, there seem to be, large number of home made banners suggesting a certain grassroots impetus lacking in mid-1990s -  Czech trade union are more bureaucratic shells and service organizations, than anything distantly resembling a 'labour movement'. It will be interesting to see if the unions can build on this; whether the Social Democrats can exploit it electorally; and - if either of the former - if the government holds its nerve.  

 

All this adds, of course, spice and interest to the upcoming Senate and local elections.

Wordle-izing Slovakia's centre-left

And, as I know you've all been lying awake, wondering about the politics of Central European social democracy, here's a quick Wordle-ization of the prgramme that Robert Fico's Smer is serving up to the Slovak electorate for their also forthcoming elections - as in the CR from an eroding position of strength but as a dominant and incumbent party, rather than the kind of hard hitting opposition you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night in the middle of a tricky EU presidency.

Compared to their Czech colleague Smer's programme throws up a lot less in the way of concrete policy, stresses the words 'Slovak' and 'state' an awful lot - suggesting a more nationalist note (as frankly you would expect) as well as the party's name. The spread of key words also suggests greater emphasis on the politics of anti-crisis and the country's position in the world economy.

Shock horror - Czech Social Democrat leader once a Socialist, then a moderate

I have been sent convincing proof that Czech Social Democrat leader Jiří Paroubek was in 1989 a functionary of the satellite Czechoslovak Socialist Party (ČSS) (above right) and gave an interview to the ČSS newspaper saying nice things about Victorious February, the Communist takeover of 28 February 1948, which saw the secular liberal-nationalist National Socialists - a stalwart of the progressive intelligenstsia in interwar Czechoslovakia and close to President Beneš broken and transformed into feeble, fellowing travelling appedage of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (some historians argue that this was the Nationalist Socialist own fault for misreading the political situation and indulging in nationalism and populism, rather than sticking to their own more liberal traditions, but that's another story).

Should we be shocked? Answer no - I am, alas, as you know, not the Perez Hilton of CEE political bloggers, and this is, frankly underwhelming news. Allthough omitted from his official online CV, Paroubek's membership of ČSS has been known for years and he can (if he can bothered) argue that he did not join Communist Party and sought through ČSS to promote some kind of political change. He joined in 1970. ČSS did have some contacts with left-wing Chartists (in Brno - not Prague where Paroubek was based) and, in fairness, the party did quickly jumpeship from the regime during the Velvet Revolution - its newspaper Svobodné slovo was one of the first to open report events. Havel's famous speech in Wenceslas Square was delivered from the balcony of the Socialist Party's publishing house, Melantrich. That might in many ways be a feeble argument - satellite parties were a powerless moribund facade organizations, but then Paroubek did leave in 1986, so he probably worked that out and correctly saw that satellite were not likely to be major vehicles for change in Gorbachev-era CEE. He had a middle management role in catering enterprise and later deputy director a footwear company - not quite 'top managment' mentioned in his official CV, but it made him small enough fry for the secret police to dismiss him as a potential informer.

In 1990 Paroubek showed a certain amount of foresight - and ambition - in joining the newly revived Social Democrat Party (ČSSD), re-founded by ageing exiles. Despite it wealth and a certain pedigree, the Socialist Party was obviously going nowhere politically after 1989, as historic brand of nationalism and liberalism was too sui generis to recreate in contemporary Czechoslovakia and the party basically stood for nothing. (Other Socialist Party functionaries joined the Moravian regionalists.) As he was relatively young. capable and not an exile Paroubek quickly rose to become the Social Democrats' General Secretary - reading through the party's history in the early years after 1989 as a PhD student I remember he was a constant presence - however, ČSSD's notalgic harping back to the 1940s, hostility to former communists and refusal to criticize market reforms (backed by Paroubek who truly was Mr Moderation at this time) made the party a flop. Only with the recruitment of reform communists and a more confrontational policy of speaking up for transition losers in blunt and populist terms did the party get anyway, finally making an electoral breakthorough in 1996 under Miloš Zeman (who joined in 1992 and bear Paroubek to the leadership in 1993). I

If anyone is scouring old newsppers, they should dig out some of Paroubek's anti-Zeman quotes, because of course, after more than a decade out of national politics doggedly establishing himself faute de mieux as a figure in Prague politics - including a stint in a Grand Coalition with the right in the nation's capital- Paroubek returns: first as Minister of Local Development, then as hard-talking populist saviour of the Social Democrats when the party went into electoral and political after being routed in the 2004 Euro-elections. These, as we all know, days Paroubek out-Zemans Zeman (now also returned to politics with his own mini-grouping the Party of Citizens Rights) for being a high profile populist bulldozer, who understands that sound bites in defence of welfare and public spending are the way to win a Czech election

I doubt any of Paroubek's potential voters will care about a bit of ideological waffle from 1980s - or, indeed all that dead-end moderation of the early 1990s.

A tale of two Slovakias

SSEES marks the 20th anniversary of November 1989 with two contrasting Slovak speakers - a nice touch, as the fall of communism in the Czechoslovakia is so often reduced to events in Prague. The Magic Lantern, Václav Havel, speech from the balcony of the Melantrich building, vast crowds packing Wenceslas Square, more crowds crowds jangling their keys in unison at rallies on the Letna plain to ring out the change of regime. Dozens of local transitions get forgotten as does and a fully fledged Tender (or Gentle) Revolution (Nežná revolúcia) in Slovakia. Similar, but different to the Velvet Revolution played out in the neighbouring Czech lands
.

The first visitor to SSEES is Fedor Gál, Slovakia sociologist, researcher, opposition activist and (latterly) film-maker and media entrepreneur, who is presenting his new documentary Dobré ráno, Slovensko (Good Morning, Slovakia) which chronicles the last days of the regime, the revolution and first six months of 1990 as the Public Against Violence movement Gál chaired (see photo below) started to be bruisingly pushed aside and internally fracture under the growing pressure from Slovak nationalism, some of it animated by ill concealed anti-semitism. Gál left to live in Prague in 1992, but is still well known enough to drawn an audience of 60-70. Most, as I later discover, are young Slovak and Czech students, though almost none from SSEES curiously enough.

Things get off to a bad start when, after opening remarks, it becomes clear that the English language version of the film won't play. We can, however, show it in Slovak, which is OK for around 80% of the audience and perhaps a blessing in disguise as the English version is overdubbed, rather undermining its effect, rather than subtitled. The film, however, is powerful and well made and in the Q and A that follows Gál shows himself to be a magnetic and charismatic speaker. If you wondered why he was a revolutionary leader, this would answer your question. The questioners are all young, the question all in Czech or Slovak, self-translated in English. Everyone agrees that communism-nationalism-and-populist social-democracy are all part and parcel of the same illiberal conundrum that plays to the lowest, materialistic and most provincial inclinations of the Slovak and Czech populace and still haunts the region. Why did thy not handle things more smartly? Boli sme blbí, Gál tells his listeners in a line you feel he's probably used before. But given the revolutionary avalanche of events and the fact he bowed out of politics almost two decades ago, that's perhaps a more than acceptable answer.

Showing up in the grander circumstances on 17 November itself to give a lecture, Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico represents precisely that Other Slovakia (my phrase) that Gál and his listeners so dislike. We had expected a bland speech, but characteristically Fico decided to deal with controversial issues bluntly and head on: not everything under communism had been all bad -welfare standards were higher and teaching in universities 'more systematic'; there had been privations and bureaucracy - he himself had had to queue through the night to book his honeymoon to Malta; the revolution was not a cause for unbridled celebration as the 'tribunes of the revolution' didn't deliver on promises of fairness and freedom and hacked away a lot of ordinary people's social certainties in their pursuit of economic and party self-interest (until the arrival of R. Fico and Smer, you understand. Politically, this is some extent a necessary move as in 1989 Fico was a member of Communist Party of Slovakia (having joined in 1987) working at the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences, although on the other hand some Czech Social Democrats have similar backgrounds as bright young things in the late socialist nomenklatura and don't feel the need for such a 'balanced' assessment of the old regime.

The main achievement of the revolution in this rather interesting Fico-ean interpretation was that it opened up the way for an independent Slovakia and for further economic modernization, although an over dependence on car construction for export would entail an economic strategy based on high public spending in these days of global recession, partly to invest in education.

In the Q & A Fico switched to Slovak, ostensibly for the sake of not being misquoted or misunderstood by the Slovak media in not quite perfect English, but presumably also because he knew he was going to say something worthy of that night's TV news. There were three questions to which he gave long, unfazed confident answers, perhaps being Robert Fico he could guess what he was going to be asked: the quality of Slovak higher education (admittedly poor, too many universities, too much local pride at stake); what would he do if he were a Slovak Hungarian (cherish and protect his own culture and learn to speak perfect Hugarian); and did he think there was a trade-off between freedom and prosperity (no but golden plated freedom could be a bit costly - Slovak officials weren't well resourced enough to deal with too many freedom of information requests).

My sympathies were, it must be said, not with Fico, who made a more convincing case for himself on his last visit in UCL in 2006. On the other hand, he has turned out to have played the smarter political game and, as one leading specialist on Slovak politics, reminded me after afterwards it is a sign of progress to have 'bog standard left-wing politics' dominating the Slovak political scence not the more paranoid and dangerous nationalism of the Mečiar era - a period oddly absent from Fico's speech - albeit suffused with a bit of dodgy nomenklatura nostalgia for social cosseting of the normalization era.

The text of the speech doesn't seem to be on the net yet, but extracts from YouTube can be seen here. Gál's film (broken down into 14 short episodes) can be seen (in Slovak) here.

Update: A video of the full lecture has now appeared on the UCL-SSEES website here.

Czech Republic: Oranges on red alert

The Czech election campaign is indeed already in full swing - at least if you are a Social Democrat. Not only are party workers - or, possibly paid employees, you never know these days - giving out orange roses at the local supermarket, but ČSSD is already forking out on a national billboard campaign. Most of it is predicatble stuff: caring nurse leaning over old people with a smile and promises of free health care; Mr and Mrs Average and their two kids and some slogan about looking their 'social certainties' paying out of the profits of the electricity oligopoly ČEZ etc etc.

But here's an interesting one: "We will not allow the return of communism". Puzzling, as the Czech Republic is not on the verge of a second Bolshevik Revolution - unless, of course, you believe the more over the top right-wing propaganda that the Social Democrats are themselves a load of old commies, which even the right seem (temporarily) to have given up on ... The real subtext I suppose is that they are telling - well, kind of suggesting to - their voters that they are not going to cosy up to the Czech Republic's hardline Communist Party (KSČM) when, in political reality, they will strike whatever deal they might need to with KSČM to govern if the electoral numbers come good for them in October: something well short of a formal coalition, I should add...

And, of course, that makes perfect sense if you want a country brimming with enough 'social certainties' to ensure that everyone has enough money to keep the wheels of capitalism turning down at the local Interspar. I'm not sure, however, if this billboard wasn't perhaps something of own goal in reminding everyone of this rather obvious home truth of Czech politics.

CEE and the Euro-elections: Left behind?

So the results of the Euro-elections are in.

Having missed out the chance of TV stardom on the BBC Euro-election results programme - half of SSEES seem to have been rung up by various BBC researchers looking for a pundit on Eastern Europe (in the end they did without one) - I can't resist a brief bit of instant(ish) analysis.

The story as generally reported from a West European perspective is that centre-right incumbents have heldon; the centre-left - opposition or incumbent - has not made expected gains against the background of global recession and social insecurity; Greens, the far right and the anti-market left made modest gains, scooping what there was in the way of Europe-wide radical protest electorate.

A quick glance suggests that CEE suggests that region looses mirrors this trend: only Robert Fico's Smer in Slovakia (as ever) has really bucked trend of social democratic under performance. Most surprisingly for me -was the performance of the Czech Civic Democrats who managed to avoid the predicted photo finish with the Social Democrats and win the Czech euro-election comfortably with 32% of the vote. The Czech Social Democrats (ODS), however, recovered from the electoral meltdown of 2004 and pulled in a more than respectable 24%, which should enable them to walk a bit taller in the depleted Socialist Group in Brussles. (They will, I suspect, be rather harder to beat in the October parliamentary elections, but, hey, this is the Czech Republic we're talking about, so the smart money should perhaps be on political deadlock).

However, closer examinations suggests something of parallel narrative in CEE. Indeed, the much discussed erosion of Social Democracy in Western Europe does not seem (as yet) to playing out in the region. Although the Hungarian Socialists were predictably whacked (losing 4 MEPS) and the Estonian social democorats too seem to have lost a seat, other social democratic parties in the region seem to have more or less held their own: as noted, the Czech Social Democrats won't be crying into their beer too much and leaders Slovakia's Smer could reasonably crack open the champagne. The Bulgarian Socialists held their own as did the Romanian and Slovenian social democrats. Even the marginalised post-communist left in Poland has undergone a minor revival.

This may perhaps be because there are few if any centre-left parties in the region can really claim to authentically social democratic. But to my mind the regional disparity seems more to interpretable in terms of CEE's less post-industrial, fragmented and multi-cultural societies posing less acute strategic dilemma.

The grand narrative of social democratic decline/crisis has been academically well set out in Herbert Kitschelt's 1994 classic The Transformation of European Social Democracy and put across in more digestable form by academic commentators such as Simon Hix in commentaries on the Euro elections. The basic story is this: social change, globalization and economic restructuring are generating competition pressures in the political arena as the big centre left parties struggle to cope with the break up of helectoral coalitions that underpinned them: Greens eating into their support among left-liberal public sector professionals, the populist far-right (and in some places workerist radical left) making inroads among working class voters in deindustrialized, credit crunched former heartlands.

Central and Eastern Europe's Greens - never a very strong electoral force - seem again to have bombed entirely. This was in part - but only in part - due to the smaller populations and hence smaller numbers of of MEPs elected in CEE states which raised the effective threshold of votes. But even in a largeish state like the Czech Republic where a mere 5% would have done the trick the Green Party (SZ) failed. The SZ gained miserable 2%, as internicine factional infighting seemed at last to have taken an electoral toll - although cynics will note that the political support of Václav Havel, which always turns out to the kiss of political death for any new party.

To get back to centre-left, CEE social democrats have it a little easier. They face little competition from eco-liberal parties - whose support is small and would probably not have gone to them in the first place - leaving economic populists and anti-establishment novelty parties as the main challenge. There is also perhaps a larger constituency demanding social protection making brusingly pro-welfare positions a safer political bet (at least when campaigning in elections). There is, I suppose, less of 'core vote' to fall back - the Czech Social Democrats' vote, for example, has rollercoasted wildly over the past decades despite the engrained social market preferences of a huge chunk of the Czech population - but in sense the lack of one is perhaps almost an advantage. After all, what you don't have can't be eroded.

I am fed up being rung up by journalists and asked about the far-right in CEE, so I'm not going so say much about this particular dog that doesn't bark (much) Given the very healthy vote for the Front National, Danish People's Party, Austrian Freedom Party, Dutch Freedom Party and, of course, and our own BNP, I am eagerly awaiting Polish and Hungarian journalists getting onto the phone up to ask wave of right-wing extremism of sweeping Western Europe threatens democracy in the region.

Inside Lenin's brain

There's a small striking black and white poster up in the lift with a familiar image of Lenin. I assume at first it's for the Socialist Workers' Party ('...Lenin's thoughts about the world crisis...' yawn) and am a bit surprised that the SWP has any sympathisers at SSEES. But when I read on get the bit about Vladimir Illich's views about advice about MPs expenses and passing exams being given by Lenin's brain on tour having been specially revived and bio-engineered Russian scientists, it dawns on me that it's a April fool, although as Soviet scientists do more or less try this in the 1920s, it's perhaps not that wide of the mark. Maybe someone working in artificial intelligence could programme some online avatar to simulate what the leader of the world proletariat would say. No doubt what remains of the traditional student far left would welcome the advice.

I sit in a small pool of light in my office using the QCA program to 'iterate' between different comparative configurations. I'd like to think this the comparative political scientist's equivalent of Lenin's brain, but it isn't and I end having to use my own rather more than I would like.
Luckily, I do get some answers, although not to the global crisis...

Imperialism and anti-imperialism in the small hours

It's early morning but I'm wide awake and I can't sleep, so I go downstairs to read. I finish off a couple of books I was reading, and almost got through, over the holiday. I always to try and read couple of non-academic books wholly unrelated to Eastern Europe, usually an impulse buy when I'm Christmas shopping or an impulse borrow from the local library. This year's selections are a biography, Tim Jeal's Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer, and Stefan Aust's recently reissued book about The Baader-Meinhof Complex about the far left terrorism of the Red Army F(r)action in 1970s West Germany.

Henry Morton Stanley turned out to be neither the pillar of the British upper classes nor the go-getting America newspaperman I had variously imagined (although he played both roles) but someone born poor and illegitimate in provincial Wales. Abandoned in a workhouse for most his childhood, he made his way, emotionally withdrawn but very determined - through the

the expanding late Victorian world and ended up in the USA, where he reinvents himself as Henry M. Stanley (assumed names, but later backed by a concocted story of adoption by a wealthy cotton planter); had a series picaresque not to say bizarre series of adventures as trader, gold prospector, deserterfrom both sides in the US Civil War before finally making it at the age of 30 as journalist and heading off to Africa for he journalistic scoop of the century: 'discovering' missionary and explorer David Livingstone, whom his best selling book subsequently mythologizes as a saintly figure.

He then turned explorer himself making two epic journeys (in opposite directions) between Zanzibar and the mouth of the Congo, sorting out the true source of the Nile and opening up central Africa for European colonialism. His candour and exaggeration of his ruthlessness in his books, says Jeal, left him with a reputation for brutality, argues, was basically undeserved. Despite laying the some of the foundations of King Leopold's Congo Free State, he can't, says Jeal reckons, be held directly responsible for the atrocities of Belgian colonialism in Congo, which later transpired, but was guilty of some political misjudgements.

This thoroughly documented shades-of-grey interpretation and mildly revisionist agenda came across as basically plausibe, although left the question of how (and if) we should judge Stanley, - as well as much of the psychology that drove him - hanging in the air. Most interesting (if underplayed in the book) was the political and social context of the time that emerges: public and political attitudes to Africa is far from the gung-ho imperialist racism overlaid by a patina of religiosity that we perhaps imagined. Indeed, what is striking is how strong altruistic, humanitarian and liberal impulses seem to have be, albeit it mixed with Realpolitik and economic self-interest. Uncomfortably, recasting some of the politically incorrect language of the time, Stanley (in Jeal's account, at least) and others emerge as a worrying modern figures concerned to deliver failed and/or underdeveloped states on the global periphery from local warlords, bringing them the benefits of development ('civilization'), open and global markets and combating mass people trafficking (abolition of East African slave trade).

Anti-imperialism in West Europe, this time in the form of protest against and outrage about the Vietnam War and depredation of the Third World were also a driving force the story of the Baader-Meinhof group and the radical left in 1970s West Germany, as told in Aust's reworked The Baader-Meinhof Complex, now, of course, a glossy and violent new film. Unlike Jeal's biography which loses a bit of readability by dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's, Aust's book has fragmented episodic structure, making for a fast and compelling read . It's easy to see why it was filmed as blockbusting political thriller-cum crime story-cum reconstruction of the 1970s.

Aust clearly knows his stuff, however, having been personally acquainted with some the leading dramais personnae and obsessively followed up the RAF story through the three decades worth of research and interviews with cops and terrorists alike. Without being too didactic, the book debunks much of the (self-)mythologization of and violent chic of the RAF as misguided but pure martyrs, showing them as a strong on verbiage, low on ideology and strategy, high on brutality (emotional and physical) and at key moments sustained by East European secret services and factions of the PLO.

There are gaps in Aust's vividly but briefly sketched account of the West German radical and ultra-radical left of the 1960s and 1970s . However with forty years' hindsight the sociological and ideological sources of the RAF seem clear enough: orthodox Leninist vanguardism, Maoist voluntarism; anarchist 'propaganda of the deed' and New Left notions of radical political engagement as a form of personal therapy; the moral ambiguity of incompletely de-Nazified West Germany and the German Social Democrats' coming to terms with it (many RAF members were briefly members of the SPD youth); and the New Left project of students, lumpenproletariat and Third World as a substitute for the Western working class's definitive failure to show up (again) for its appointed historical role of revolutionary vanguard.

The psychology and background key RAF personalities, however, remain as much of a cipher that of the compulsively driven Stanley and his fellow explorers/adventurers, although both seem to share a self-destructive urge and strangely toxic mix of overblown moral certainty and callous brutality. However, I couldn't help the rather odd feeling that world of the Baader-Meinhof Complex was utlimately more distant and unfamiliar - perhaps the word I am looking for is irrelevant - than of that Stanley and late Victorian imperialism/globalization in the making.

Slovakia: Greens to take new direction?

Slovak right-leaning/liberal daily Smer reports on the difficult relationship with Slovakia’s Green Party. While the Greens in the neighbouring Czech Republic are a key part of a centre-right coalition and relations with the opposition Social Democrats are pretty icy, Slovak Greens, more conventionally, have signed a co-operation agreement with Robert Fico’s governing centre-left Smer ('Direction') party. (Having flopped in the early 1990s - as happened in so much of CEE - the Slovak Greens were previously part of the not too successful centre-left e coalition with post-communists and social democrats before Smer came crashing onto the political scene, so there is a of precedent ). However, Prime Minister Fico’s criticisms of radical environmental protesters in the Tatra national park have not endeared him to his new allies in the small extra-parliamentary Green Party and raised doubts about the supposed ‘greening’ of Smer, a party better known for its nationalist and populist inclinations than its post-materialist concerns.

The Greens have also laid into the government’s motorway building plans and are none too keen on the current Minister of the Environment, Ján Chrbet, a member of the radical Slovak National Party (SNS) and his ‘populist’ allocation of EU environmental funds. Commentators quoted by the right-leaning Smer dismiss the party’s ‘greening’ as a superficial exercise designed to boost its social democratic credentials in the eyes of West European partners. Given the Slovak Greens’ dissatisfaction and reasonably good 2.7% rating in recent polls, it looks like they may be tempted to go elsewhere and perhaps try their luck as Czech style eco-liberal party.

Slovakia: Empty lionizing of Dubček suggests social democracy lacks roots

A recent issue of Slovak daily Sme contains a report of a speech by Slovak PM Robert Fico (full text here) to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Alexander Dubček, ill-fated leader of the Prague Spring and early figurehead of post-communist social democracy in Slovakia. As a man of the left, Fico, unsurprisingly has a positive take on Dubček whose thoughts he told his audience he and fellow leaders of SMER find alive and inspiring to this day and feel moral duty to continue them. Just what thoughts Dubček and his generation of Prague Spring reform communists more have to offer to contemporary Slovakia was, was however, left tantalizingly vague. Dubček, Fico told listeners, saw democracy as essentially an exercise in civilized dialogue. He was also a ‘leading figure in the European socialist movement’ and a humanist, aware of his responsibility for civilization, who believed in advancing knowledge through co-operation with scholars (s vedcami). Another speaker, Ivan Laluh, president of the Alexander Dubček Society , offered a similarly motherhood-and-apple-pie assessment of Dubček as standing for ‘humanism, social justice, decency and tolerance’ - which could apply to most European liberal, social democratic or (even) Christian Democratic politicians of any standing.

The awkward truth seems to be that, however sympathetically one might look at the tragedy of Czechoslovak reform communism - and it is something of a breath of fresh air to find more than the dismissal and amnesia characteristic of much Czech public debate on the period - it has little to say today. Dubček’s political inactivity during the ‘normalization’ period of the 1970s and 80s and short-lived political career after 1989 also amount to relatively little. So why the fuss? At one level, there is a simple a nationalist rationale. Slovaks Fico pointedly noted should ‘immerse ourselves more deeply in the thought of Slovak scholars and politicians, who have inscribed themselves on the consciousness of Europe’ even if - as in Dubček’s case - these are somewhat shallow waters. Dubček’s status in Slovakia is therefore understandably higher - Slovakia’s newest university in Trenčín was re-named Alexander Dubček University in 2002, an honour unlikely to be bestowed on any Czech leaders of the Prague Spring in their home republic.

Fico opponents might, however, detect a darker side in his comments that Dubček’s concept of democracy as civilized debate had not been attained in contemporary Slovakia as people were too intolerant and ‘too strongly intoxicated with freedom of speech’ which, translated, may mean there is too much criticism of his government in the media and society. Possibly, we should think back beyond the humanism and apple pie to remember the more authoritarian impulses during the 1960s of Dubček et al to regulate pluralism and debate so as to ensure they delivered social consensus around the ‘right’ result - something often overlooked in many accounts because the Prague Spring was progressive and democratically minded by the standards of communist one party rule in Eastern Europe. As Peter Siani-Davies’s excellent book on the Romanian Revolution reminds us the semi-authoritarian populism of the National Salvation Front in part had its roots in the technocratic authoritarianism and engineered dialogue to ensure Consensus of would-be communist reformers who opposed Ceausescu, as well as the country’s more obviously authoritarian and nationalist traditions.

In other ways, however, the vacuous lionizing of Dubček seem to underline the ideologically shallow roots of SMER and the Slovak centre-left. In the absence of a strong historic social democratic tradition, it has few models or historical figures to draw on not obviously compromised by association with the Stalinism of 1950s or the ‘normalization’ of the 1970s and 80s and ‘Europe’ no longer offers a comfortable template following SMER’s suspension from the Party of European Socialists. Moreover, as the current controversy over public remembrance of Andrej Hlinka awkwardly demonstrates, there are plenty of historic reference points for those of Catholic-populist-nationalist persuasion to fix on.

European Socialists may soften line on Slovakia's SMER

Slovak liberal daily Sme reports that some Austrian and German Social Democrats are willing to consider re-admitting Robert Fico’s SMER into the Party of European Socialists, despite its coalition with the extreme, Hungarian-ophobe Slovak National Party (SNS), or at least to take some steps to normalizing relations. Pragmatic reasons seem to inform this step: Fico, despite some rather paranoid sounding attacks on the media, seems not in practice to have steered a reasonable respectable course policy-wise and keep SNS at arm’s length. Essentially, it appears they are buying into Fico’s justification that such a coalition can be innocuous and indeed means of managing extremists. The fact that SMER is riding high the polls and is clearly not going to disappear as a dominant political force might also have something to do with it. Will it I wonder lead to a broader reappraisal about Social Democrats engaging with the darker populist inclinations of working class voters and others left behind by reform?

PES will review SMER’s suspension at a meeting on 4 October. SMER’s only strong ally in PES at a party level have been the Czech Social Democrats.

Slovak press sees Czechs as laggards despite latest reform package

Slovak liberal daily Sme assesses the Czech reform package of flatter and lower taxation which has, as expected, just squeaked through the Czech parliament - although the headline rate of income tax seems lower in the CR (15% falling to 12.5% in 2009; 19% in Slovakia), it points out effective tax rates are higher as both employees’ and employers’ health and social security payments are included in the Czech tax base. Slovak corporation tax at 19% is still lower, although Czech rates are set to fall to that level over the next three years, and there are no taxes on share dividends. Twisting the knife, Sme notes that the real problem is that there is no strong reform coalition in the CR as there was in Slovakia in 1998-2006. However, if the price of such a coalition is the left blasting back into power a few years later a la Robert Fico, Czech free marketeers might do well do consider whether they in fact may have some hidden advantages, although, that said, the current consensus seems to be that Fico, despite posing as a kind of Central European Hugo Chavez, cannot and will not touch the main pillars of earlier neo-liberal reforms and Czech politics seems polarized even before any really radical reforms have been passed.

Never mind the Sex Pistols, here's ... Robert Fico

I travelled up to London on the train listening to an oddly alternating mix of Irish traditional music and the Sex Pistols on a cheap (and malfunctioning) MP3. This mix of lyrical national sentiment and take-me-as-you-find-me iconoclasm was not entirely inappropriate, as Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was in town - and (more importantly, if more briefly) was visiting SSEES, where as a Masaryk Scholar in 1999 he first set out the idea of founding the new political party, that became SMER – Social Democracy, now Slovakia's dominant party - The plan was create a new force, which could deliver reform of the centre-left without becoming bogged down in the old nationalist vs. liberal, world vs. Vladmír Mečiar conflicts that characterized Slovak politics for much of the 1990s.

Somewhat distrusted for his populist leanings even as a rising star in opposition, since winning the 2006 elections, Fico has acquired the reputation of being something of the Johnny Rotten of Central European politics and has attracted similarly dreadful headlines. Forming what The Economist terned an ‘iffy and wiffy’ coalition with far-right Slovak National Party (SNS) and Vladimír Mečiar’s declining ex-ruling party of 1990s, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) after last year’s elections, his party gained the dubious distinction of being the first member party to be booted out of the Party of European Socialists. Despite leaving much of the previous right-wing government’s neo-liberal welfare and tax reforms in place, foreign trips to Libya (where, as well as having warm words for Colonel Gadaffi, as did Tony Blair, he described the Bulgarian nurses and one Palestian doctor convicted on trumped up sounding charges of spreading HIV, as ‘perpetrators’ - much to the consernation of the European Parliament and wider EU for whom it is an obvious injustice and a cause celebre) sent signals that he was a bit more Chavez than Blair, as did opposition to proposed stationing of the US anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, warming the cockles of President Putin’s heart on a visit to Moscow – savvier comrades in the Czech Social Democratic Party simply sidestepped the issue by calling for a referendum; and a visit to the Cuba Embasssy in Bratislava to celebrate the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Together with more minor signs and signals such as the BBC World Service suddenly losing its Slovak FM frequencies, the impression, fanned by liberal opponents, is of an emerging anti-Western, or at least anti-American, illiberal ‘Mečiarism lite’ out of step with the rest of the EU.

Fico in person, however, did quite a good job of puncturing this enfant terrible image and. unlike some politicians of a more liberal persuasion in similar circumstances, was more than willing to take questions and comments and argue his case. He justified the coalition in terms of stability and as the best option for getting key social democratic policies through, arguing that he had effectively cordoned off SNS and HZDS by having them in office, rather than keeping them out of government and stressed that his foreign policy was more European and less American oriented than that of previous governments. The Visegrad group still mattered for Slovakia and its European policy would reflect this. Overall, the session left me turning over some interesting thoughts about the nature of social democracy in CEE and its (possible) relaionship with nationalism, liberalism and populism, which distantly echo debates in Britain’s very own populist-cum-social democratic party, New Labour. Once again, as with home grown left-populists like George Galloway or Tommy Sheridan, I was impressed with an ability to put across position I was basically unsympathetic to.

Whether such political acumen is enough to shift his reputation as one of the bad boys of the region, indeed or more broadly to establish a pragmatic left-populist alternative of the kind Smer seems to represent as legitimate part of the European political landscape remains to be seen.