Chronicle of a (party) death foretold

I am not always the most astute of pundits, but as the dust settled a year ago even I could see that the Veci veřejné ('Public Affairs'), the anti-establishment, anti-corruption party that was the surprise package last May's Czech elections would - to borrow Kevin Deegan Krause's phrase - live fast and die young. And, as I write, VV seems to be on its political deathbed, rapidly expiring from an outbreak of splits and scandals, extreme even by local standards, that seems to be the political equivalent of ebola fever  - and may yet carry away the Czech government centre-right coalition  government of Petr Nečas in which VV is a junior partner. Expulsions and splits have seen four of VV's 24 deputies leave the party; its chief sponsor and de facto leader Vít Bárta resign as transport minister; and its two bigger partners demand that Mr Bártaand cronies from the ABL security firm leave the government.

Vít Bárta/ Fotobanka ČTK

The problem? Revelations in the media over recent days, have bluntly confirmed  - with documentary and audio evidence - what most people suspected all along:

1) that, nothingwithstanding claims to a postmodern party of electronic direct democracy run through snazzy electronic referendums of members and sympathisers, Mr Bárta controlled and orchestrated the whole organisation;

2) that he used extremely an extremely basic method of party management to keep leading deputies on board,  of the kind that any City of London banker would recognise: he paid them huge sums of cash;

3) that he   backed VV as a project to foward his Napoleonic business ambition for his security company ABL, rightly recognising that public sector contracts were a lucrative source of cash and required political contacts;

4) that VV was conceived as an essentially local project,aimed at securing influence, indeed control, local councils in two Prague boroughs and was conceived as a kind of insurance policy or plan B, to run in parallel with efforts to gain influence in local organisations of the Civic Democrats;

5) that Mr Bárta is a ruthless operator keen on industrial espionage and subterfuge, including the creation of  'pseduo-competitors' to maintain an illusion of transparency and competiton in tenders, and that he transfered some of these techniques to political activities using his company to track the activities of local politicians in Prague.

Given that Veci veřejné's appeal and origins were one of anti-corruption, transparency and taking on political dinosaurs - its name better translated as Public Interest or Res Publica and it was originally a local community politics initiative in Prague formed in respons to murky ways local municipal housing was being privatised deal - there would seem to be no way back, especially as Mr Bárta, who is clearly a strategic thinker of some skill, was foolish enough to put his strategy down in writing.

 Now the only question would seem to be which way the collapsing structure will fall and how many of its deputies will be recoverable, reliable and usable for the two main parties in centre-right coalition, the Civic Democrats (ODS) and TOP09. This is a totally a forlorn hope. There are some impressively able young er people and political marketers in the VV fold, as well oddballs, ABL cronies and second rank figures well out of their depth (like the party's notional leader and hapless Interior Minister, the former investigative journal Radek John) and for a working majority the other two parties would need about 10-12 ex-Večkaři.

From a more nerdish political science point of view it seems a shame that this most unusual and interesting political phenomenon - closer to the 'pocket parties' created by businesspeople in the Baltic state or (it now seems) the phoney virtual parties of the former Soviet Union - is soon to be no more, although its death may be drawn out, mucky and unedifying. Perhaps most telling is that far from being corrupted and eaten into by holding power, the whole project was tainted and corrupt from the start, subverting the political appeal of anti-corruption and anti-establishment  politics to perpetuate and develop the very phenomena it was fighting against. Perhaps I shouldn't be too worried, however, as other will no doubt be trying out and improving upon Mr Bárta's business model in the choppy electoral markets of Czech politics.

It was twenty two years ago today...

That student demonstration in London against the Tory government that turned violent?

I was there. Quite close to where it all kicked off, in fact, although by accident and I missed the more dramatic bits that got on the telly.

But don't worry,  I wasn't bloke with the fire extinguisher. And actually,  I didn't leven leave the house today. And did nothing more violent that scrawl some red lines on a draft of someone's PhD.  You see it, was all more than 20 years ago...

On 24 November 1988 along with with several coach loads of Leeds University students went down to London for the biggest student protest of the decade. It was  a nationwide National Union of Students demonstration to protest against (shock horror) the abolition of student maintenance grants and their replacement with loans.  We were genuinely outraged and waves of mobilization - added to the prospect of a good day out with out mates- even reached the rather apolitical, but very friendly Russian Department. As I recall coach tickets were about £3 or £4. It was quite a warm day, as I remember, and we all got quick a kick out of marching through the streets and chanting - sense of empowerment or identify incentives, I guess I would call it today - and there was a real buzz to being in large, like-minded crowd of people just like us.

Then for some reason we ended up in a milling crowd in a dead end somewhere near the Houses of Parliament. We were by Westminster Bridge and we couldn't go anywhere. We all got quite bored and fed up and the crowd probably thinned out slightly, giving it a slightly more militant and political composition. There were certainly an impressive variety of far-left and Trotskyist newspaper sellers, which - being interested in theories of state capitalism and the like in those days - I could probably have ticked off trainspotter style. I'm not quite sure what happened next. The mood was, I suppose, probably getting uglier. I remember a police inspector walking ineffectually through the milling crowd with a megaphone telling us to disperse and everyone conspicouously ignoring him, although I don't think we had any very militant intentions. We just didn't want to day to be over. In the end my friend, now I believe a successful lawyer in California although we lost touch year ago, suggested that call it a day and find a pub.

This was a pretty convincing argument even during the days of High Thatcherism. We didn't find a pub and, with anti-Zellig like precision, we missed the "Battle of Westminster" A few minutes later mounted police  spectacularly charged through the milling crowd at the end of the bridge and brought the impasse to an end. The university's more militant student revolutinaries, I was told, had cunningly taken the tube over the river, but been arrested. Back on the coach, we booed as the radio news reported that students had rained missiles down on police and cheered when we learned that the Queen Mother had been stuck in the traffic chaos we had caused.

'Major conflict': The young Dr Sean woz 'ere (almost)

Back on our early morning Russian grammar class the next day - present participles, I think it was ( I was rather good at them) - we wondered what had happened. Clearly, we hadn't been manipulated by sinister Trotskyists, although we couldn't vouch that they hadn't led the march somewhere it shouldn't have gone by packing the front ranks. Perhaps we wouldn't have cared if we had known. At least, we thought  they saved from being stuck in some park listening to some dull as ditchwater speech the then National Union of Students President, Maeve Sherlock (now Baroness Sherlock).

Like a lot (but not all) protest in the 1980s, it all came to nothing - and I suspect deep down  we inwardly knew that at the time -  and the system of student loans duly  came in in my final year. On graduation, having been pretty frugal, I owed the state-back Student Loans Company the princely sum of £300.

This is, of course, all history. The Battle of Westminster - or perhaps we should say, Brief But Somewhat Violent Police Charge of Westminster is now the subject of a much cited academic article about social identity and crowd psychology: it is  quite right that it was cock-up rather conspiracy han and that , yes, as Social Identity Analysis suggested we were slightly been radical and less law-abding after the event than before, but we didn't all rush to join the Socialist Workers Party.

It was, of course, a different age then. No internet, no mobiles, no Twitter, no Facebook.  Approximately, half the student numbers of today (although the queues for the banks of photcopiers in hte Library were horrendous( None of us would have understood the 'tuition fees'. And I would have no more believed that communism would collapse than that men from Mars would land outside Leeds Town Hall.

And in hindsight, it all seems rather than cosy and innocent, although after Mrs Thatcher's third election victory in 1987, the papers were full of predictions that a Maoist-style free market Cultural Revolution was about the be unleashed. Perhaps it was and I never noticed.

So having a break for coffee I watch Guardian online footage of the London Day of Action with marchers trooping past UCL. How does it all compare? The atmosphere, placards and slogans seem curiously the same - has no one thought of a catchier slogan than "They Say Cutback, We Say Fightback" in two decades -  and the numbers (around 50,000) are similar too, although the current protest seem slightly bigger and to have a momentum missing im 1988. The Twitter feed of the demo - not something available in 1988 (my reporter friend from Leeds Student tasked to track Maeve Sherlock quickly lost his story in the unfolding chaos) - suggests today's students are about as witty as we were when it comes to doing homemade placards, although the stakes today are (for some people, at least) bigger and humour blacker.  Organizational confusion and resulting breakawy leading to a headline-grabbing clash  around a symbolic centre of power (then Westminster, today Millbank), is spookily similar - as are the debates about whether it has done the student cause a favour by crashing onto the headlines and registering  anger or just played into the hands of a hostile media. There are also the predictable accusations that the whole thing was staged by extremists (then the Socialist Workers Party, this time round anarchists).

What seems different (at least judging by the Guardian footage) is that today's marchers are a damn sight more socially and ethnically diverse - and younger , including FE and college students- than the crowd I was in 1988: the proposed changes of 2010 seem a much bigger deal than those of 1988 and also much more of a class issue, like to see some denied big opportunities and others.In truth, however, I suspect, what has happened is that proposals have thrown into sharp relief the already class-ridden  and unequal character of higher education.

My own feelings about  events are surprisingly mixed. I am fascinated by (what might be) an unfolding social movement, but a mixture of middle age and being one of the 'Thatcher's Children' generation that saw most protest lead to naught leaves me with an engrained scepticism. I also doubt that the interests of university staff and students are as closely aligned as trade union and student union leaders would have us believe. 

The new movement is inevitably overhyped. A blog post written by one of the students occupying  UCL's Jeremy Bentham Room - a nice, undisruptive target used mainly for social events and conferences- claims student protests are inventing a new organizational model.  Actually, he seems to be re-discover the idea of the social movement in the age of Facebook and blogging  and splashing about an awful political science jargon. There's a pleasingly in-your-face quality to all this and if this is the beginning of a the kind of multiform 'alliance of resistance' some trade unionists have started to image - a sort of angry-as-hell Tea Party movement  of the public sector- capable of real national impact, rather than a replay of the damp squib student protest of 1980s, then I guess that's OK and a few pieces of schlock political science analysis are a small price to pay.


After all, who knows, maybe we are all in it together?

Tea parties Czech style?

 The rise of the US Tea Party party movement has held a weird fascination even for those who normally find US politics boring or incomprehensible: revolutionary but right-wing;  a citizens movement, but one making inroads into party-electoral politics; leaderless, but well organised and unstoppable; anti-establishment protest movement born of economic crisis, but one animated by pro-market populism that wants to fell Big Government, rather than shelter behind the protections it can give. None of this is, of course, that inexplicable: money talks, US politics is loosely stuctured and the boundaries between parties and movements are blurred by European standards and there are strong exisiting traditions of anti-state, anti-tax and pro-market populism, recently revivied by the hubble-bubble over the internet economy.

"Budgetary responsability, anyone?"

Still, after the 'shallacking' dealt to out Barrack Obama, Tea Parties are (at least until next week) the wave of the future and commentators across the globe have been looking for parallels elsewhere, especially in their own particular patch. Major TP backer the Heritage Foundation predictably sees the movement going international and manages to mention both the Czech and Slovak Republic as well (rather more implausibly) Sweden as recent examples (was it the Sweden Democrats they were thinking of?). The Economist  also noted the same parallel a while back in relations to the emergence pro-market anti-establishmenTOP09 and Public Affairs in the CR and Freedom and Solidarity (SaS)  in Slovakia.

So not surprisingly, Czech commentators have jumped with alacrity into looking for Čajové dýchánky or teapartismus in their own neck of the woods. That Tea Parties are  an anti-establishment  populist revolt from below against experts and the political class, as MFDnes columnist and blogger Zdeněk Muller concludes, seems a safe, if unenlightening first move. But hang on, who in the Czech Republic is the establishment and who are the whacko populists? For some, any Czech and Central/continental European populism is, by definition, of the statist, collective, redistributionist variety. Milla Lilla on The New York Review of Books, for example, argues that the current wave of social and industrial protest in France against retrenchmant of pensions is a Tea Party a la française: angry, unco-ordinated popular mobilization  ritualistically going through the motions of attacking familiar targets, but triggered by times of global uncertainty -  at once in a familiar idiom, but hollow, new, different and edgy,

So, as early as March, one Czech right-wing commenator was rather confusedly urging a responsible  but Tea Party-ish revolt against the populism of the Social Democrats for wild and irresponsible promises, which allegedly made them unfit to run for office.As Czech voters were not unduly impressed by such promises on polling day (when the Social Democrats flopped badly) that could perhaps have left it to the good sense of the electorate and am I the only person to remember Václav Klaus's weasel words in 1993 that transformation was basically over, or saying that salaries would double during the run-in to the 1996 election? 

So perhaps Lukáš Hoder, writing in FinMag, is closely to the mark in speaking of a 'new populism' of fiscal responsibility  which marries populist animus against elites with pro-market, or rather anti-statist, politics. Viewed through the prism of Czech politics, Public Affairs (VV) has a Tea Party-ish flavour to it in its crusade against political dinosaurs and support for market reforms in healthcare. On the other hand, VV's cutting edge appeal seem to a more a mix of novelty and anti-corruption and its voters and legislators turned out to be a mixed and, in some ways, rather centrist bunch. Like Ivan Krastev, Mr Hoder fingers globalization, detached technocratic elites and top-down European integration as likely suspect for the new populism. But Krastev's once fresh analysis of a couple of years ago now looks oddly dated in its characterisation of populismtmovements in Europe as being defined by cultrual illiberalism, economic egalitarianisn and xenophobically tinged nationalism. To borrow Benjamin Barber's terminology from a seminal article which holds up surprisingly well despite being almost 20 years old (and very stereotypical on the post-communist world), these days angry populist can rally to either 'Jihad' (nativist fundamentalism of all types) or 'McWorld '(citizens reduced to taxpayer-consumers in a world more about markets than states or societies).

Being more savvy than the aveage journalist, political scientists have, of course, picked up on this. Kevin Deegan Krause at Pozorblog , for example,  speaks of the rise of in CEE in recent years of  a new type of anti-establishment party ‘culturally liberal … attractive to younger, educated voters making extensive use of social networking software:’ with similar (10-15%) vote shares

 ‘…not exactly a new party family (though in their cultural liberalism and anti-corruption emphases they share significant elements) and not exactly a new party type (though their methods and organization do not fit fully with any of the currently hypothesized [organiszational] models, even cartel and firm models), but with strong and intersecting elements of both.’

including the Czech Republic's TOP and Public Affairs, Slovakia's Freedom and Solidarity, the Green-ish youth-oriented Politics Can Be Different (LMP) in Hungary as well as  new pro-market parties that crashed onto the political stage in the Baltic states in over the past decade, such as  the People's Party and New Era in Latvia or Res Publica. And, of course, as new youth driven protest parties go, we should not forget the region's most successful one, the definitely not culturally or economically liberal, extreme -right Jobbik,  'a far-right for the Facebook Generation' as an excellent analysis in EUobserver put it, although as one of my PhD student noted at a seminar last week Jobbik activists has a penchant for social activism and community politics(and marching around in paramilitary uniforms).

It's hard to separate out the diverse elements of shifting kaleidescope: anger, youth, disenchament, anti- politics and anti-poltiicians, newnness, globalization, the web as a low cost means of mobilization.  Is the story one of organization, ideology or just raw indignation? And which of these is bringing something new?



The Czech Communists, for example, also see a parallel between Public Affairs (VV) and the Tea Parties, but for them it is old wine in new bottles: all are creatures of powerful business interests plugging the same Neo-Liberal Economic Doctrine (capitals letters for Capital, comrades). Oddly, enough this is very close the analysis carried in one page commentary the Last Word column accompanying the business-oriented Fleet Sheet press summary, which has seen VV and TOP09 (especially) as insurance policies for various politically well-connected business lobbies with the most vested of vested interests. Meanwhile, a column for long established contrarian Czech net journal Britské listy a similar but slightly different angle:  Tea Parties (and by implication VV) it argued are  examples of 'asro-turf,'orchestrated  but spontaneous (pseudo-)grass roots movements created and financed by business sponsors for self-interested reasons - the subject of a new anti-Tea Party documentary (although the US Democrats and New Labour have used the same strategy) This analysis kind of fits, although VV was more virtual astro-turf as popular moblisation (such as it was) took place in cyber space, rather than in the form of placard waving and whooping at conventions.

Tea for ten million on an artifical lawn?

Drowning in Berlin

The last few days have found me at a workshop on populism and democracy in Europe and Latin American at the Wissenschaftzentrum in Berlin, trying to see what the (politically) late and unlamented Dr Sládek and his far right Republican Party can contribute to debate about comparative populisms. It's been a mixed experience from the outset: a smooth train journey to Luton is followed but a hellish two hour Easyjet check in queue and stressful sprint across the airport to get to the departure gate; Berlin's Schonefeld seems to be the Luton airport of Germany, but after a long trek to the station all is redeemed by a fantastic Wurst with lashing of mustard at a down at heel kiosk and a soothing Russian fairy story my Ukrainian fellow passengers on the train into town are reading their small son.

The academic side is similarly mixed: I take my hat off to Kevin Deegan-Krause's superb discussion of populism and democracy, which somehow slipped into his paper on Slovakia, and watch him editing his powerpoints only to discover that he is, in fact, doing an on the spot analysis elegantly integrating the diverse mix of cases. If I still had a metaphorical hat , I would need need to take it off again.

Dr Sládek and his party, however, seems to be a less than useful addition to proceedings: too small to have much influence on Czech democracy and too defunct to be very interesting. My discussant helpfully suggests there might be some kind of legacy stemming from Dr S, but the contemporary Czech far-right is so marginal - and so varied - that it must at best be a micro-legacy and More generally, it is hard to avoid the impression that European and Latin American cases, as too often with inter-regional studies, are passing like ships in the nights: superficially united, like the city itself, but with a host of underlying differences. I am dog tired.

Early the next day I get a yellow double decker and watch an odd mix of 19th century, state socialist and ultra-modern buildings drift by until we pass the Bundestag and get to the Hauptbahnhof. Right platform, right carriage, right seat and go sleep. When I wake up we are Dečin. There is no border control now, but the train has broken down. and a locomotive needs to be rep[laced (it is, 20 minutes later) There is torrential rain. Outside the river Labe looks fit to burst its banks (it does two days later).

Despite the dire weather and the black skies, as sometimes happens, I really am glad to be in the Czech Republic.

2010: For whom the bell TOLs?

The BBC's annual Correspondents Look Foward programme has, characteristically, nothing to say about Central and Eastern Europe. It is now a backwater of global politics, seemingly. Even Russia barely gets a mention and the programme peters out with a self-indulgent discussion of the World Cup.

Transitions Online (TOL), does however, does carry a look ahead feature on CEE in 2010 but, unfortunately, it is scarely better than the BBC's non-discussion of the region. A translation of a commentary in the Czech economic daily Hospodářské noviny, it manages to serve up every cliche in the book about Central and Eastern Europe being rocked by a wave of nationalism and populism driven by economic crisis, which will hit harder in the region in the coming year.

Interestingly, the concrete developments that are flagged offer, as so often, a mixed picture: the Czech communists indeed may gain greater leverage after the Czech election, but they are hardly putting on the votes and this will depend on the electoral arithmetic and the decisions of the Social Democrats if they win (hardly evidence of a 'wave of extremism') . A Grand Coalition is frankly just as likely.

Hungary's election is likely to produce a sweeping win for the right putting paid for would-be reformist, centre left government led by a beleagued centre-left PM called Gordon B. - which sounds disconcertingly familiar, although in this case the wretched incumbernt is Gordon Bajnai and the third party is likely to be the far-right Jobbik. At last some genuine extremists on the up to give all that fire and brimstone some reality... However, although on 12% in the latest poll Jobbik seems unlikely to match the 14% it took in the Euro-elections. A historically good score of 10%, I should think, but the far-right has had electoral presence of around 5% previously and sat in parliament, so we are not in totally new territory here.

Robert Fico, perhaps the one sure thing in Central and East European politics these days, also seems set to romp home in the Slovak elections - and it seems that this bad boy of the European Socialist Group will indeed play the nationalist card and here too there is a far-right competitor of sorts in the Slovak National Party (SNS).

The game plan for anyone inclined to a favourable view of RF is that it's all in the good cause of dumping the Slovak Nationalists as a coalition partner and possibly out of parliament by incorporating some of their electorate into the political elephant that is SMER. Along with the seemingly unstoppable electoral juggernaut of Fidesz, Poland's Civic Platform, Bulgaria's GERB - a kind of centre-right parallel to Fico's interesting mix of mainstream respectability and edgy populism - SMER is now one of biggests and the highest polling party in the region, althoughs its 40%-ish ratings , which have actually been dipping a bit recently, pale before the 2/3 of the vote Viktor Orbán and his merry men (and women) seem set to pull in.

In any case, the real story seems to be one of big parties sweeping up votes by whatever means works, although yes, there is populism and nationalism about, this year as every year in the same way that there is grass in your garden. It is sometimes under control, n, occasionally grows and gets a big unruly and out of control, changes colour across the seasons and then gets cut again. It's not very lovely, and everything out there doesn't always look that rosy, but its part of the landscape and, of course, you don't have the option of paving it over and replacing the populace with a handpicked citizenry composed of liberal-minded financial journalists and economics PhDs

Happy New Year.

Dr Novák Goes to Prague

As the last 2009 issue of the news magazine Respekt points out, one of the few political players who will be able look back on difficult, confusing and not very good year for Czech politics is caretaker Prime Minister, Jan Fischer. Chosen for his obscurity, adminstrative competence, colourlessness and lack of political partisanship and clout, Mr Fischer, the head of the Czech Statistical Office, has since morphed into the Little Big Man of Czech politics, enjoying record approval ratings even has he oversees painful economic medicine and has gained a degree of leverage and free of manoevre from the parties that put him into office. He also, of course, shoulld include the judges of the Czech Constitutional Court on his New Years card list as it was their decision that scrapped the planned bringing foward of scheduled parliamentary elections as unconstitutional - and hence extending is term of office from one summer to one year. Rumour (vehemently denied by Mr Fischer himself) even has it that he might, at the crucial moment, throw in his lot with the new TOP09 party, still doing well in the polls having edged narrowly ahead of the Communists in to take third place.

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.

BNP on Question Time: Kilroy wasn't here

I sat in the front of the TV with one eye on a sheaf of article from the Czech press and one eye on BBC TV's widely billed, controversial edition of Question Time, it flagship panel discussion programme featuring British National Party leader Nick Griffin: the first time the far-right has been accorded the accolade of such recognition, although the BNP has had relatively easy access to the airwaves with its representatives regularly being interviewed on the radio. And, of course, British far-right parties have regularly been exposed and infiltrated by TV documentary makers since 1970s.

To make up for the howls of protest, the programme makers decided to make Nick Griffin's appearence on their programme the central issue, so the format largely shifted from multiple current affairs questions and familiar party ding-dong to a series of critical uestions about the BNP and its leader: specifically were its views whacky, extreme and racist and its leader someone who cannot explain away his earlier public record as neo-fascist and Holocaust denier.

The answer, of course, is that they were and he couldn't. All in all, it was reassuringly unimpressive performance by the BNP leaders, lacking not only any credible answers but also professionalism, poise or personal charm. I remember once watching Jean Marie Le Pen comprehensively outmanoeuvre a left-wing opponent on TV discussion with a mixture of sure footing cunning and avuncular bluster on French TV in the 1980s. Happily, the BNP leader clearly wasn't in this league.

I was just about to turn back to Prague municipal politics, however, when suddenly I caught flash of the kind of leader the British radical populist far-right probably does need and the kind of politician we probably should fear: it was Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrats' spokesperson for home affairs - up to that point a grey and totally forgettable presence on the panel, - launching into an eloquent tirade about how Britain should have closed its borders to citizens of new (that is predominantly, East European) EU member states for as long as possible and wasn't it awful that the government that the government didn't do this and lots of them came over here... Open borders in an opern liberal Europe. What a disaster.

For a fleeting moment, I though Mr Huhne, an unsuccessful contender for his party's leadership in 2007, was making a pitch for the BNP leadership, which to judge from his poor performance Nick Griffin might soon be vacating. Then I realised, of course, that, having slipped out of anti-fascist mode, he was simply illustrating the well established truth that immigrant-bashing and playing up to the public xenophobia is OK provided you are a respectable person from a resepctable mainstream party. And, Mr Huhne, - public school, Oxford, the City, economist and financial journalist, long-serving MEP, policy expert - is certainly that.

And then it struck me that, here - not necessarily in the person of Mr Huhne - but some of some ambitious, well educated, well spoken, reasonably well known figure public figure gone maverick that the real threat of more articulate, credible and dangerous far-right lies. No of burden of neo-fascist pedigree or a penchant for anti-semitism tor seeing the positive side of Hitler that, fortunately for us, encumbers Nick Griffin (and later held back Le Pen and Joerg Haider). Political or media skills already honed. Stock of political respectability already laid in.

Such figures seem to be media personalities with a certain political-cum-academic commentators (Pym Fortyn, Robert Kilroy-Silk) or frustrated members of existing parties, who turn maverick or decide to air views on race, minorities or immigration they have previously kept to themselves. Interestingly, Liberal parties, typically often under electtoral pressure from bigger competitors of left and right, whose identity is often a rather unstable mix of anti-establishment, pro-market, pro-market and pro-little person/geographical periphery appeals, seem especially vulnerable to such occasionally odd mutations: Haider's Austrian Freedom Party was originally a liberal grouping, controversial anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders was once an MP for Holland's Liberals the VVD; Germany's FDP was hit by accusations of anti-semitism in 2002-3 because of statements of one its then rising stars, the late Jurgen Molleman; in the mid-1990s factions in the FDP associated with the nationalist Neue Rechte intellectual (unsuccessfully) sought a Haider-style transformation of the party.

I don't, of course, expect to see Mr Huhne leading the BNP or indeed some populist confection (although I'm sure he'd do an excellent job if he did), but as the comedian Alan Davies pointedly pnoted on the This Week programme that followed Question Time's BNP-fest, Griffin's party are not a hugely successful or professional outfit and don't deserve high profile controverst treatment and still less the back-handed compliment of being banned from Question Time.

The real threats lie elsewhere. We clearly had a lucky escape when ex-Labour MP and chat show host Robert Kilroy-Silk proved too maladroit and egomaniacal to take over the UK Independence Party in 2004. Celebrity populists and mavericks peeling away from already opportunistic mainstream seem a potentially far more potent force than the wafer thin veneer of respectability and normality of a welfare chauvinist niche party that can't escape its neo-fascist roots like the BNP.

Lithuania: Who wants to be... Prime Minister?

Over at Pozorblog Kevin Deegan Krause has a whimsical and pointed commentary about the vacuous but brilliant election campaign of Lithuania's National Resurrection Party (Tautos prisikėlimo partija), run by a TV presenter Arūnas Valinskas, who hosts the local franchise of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The TPP's advertising mix of clean up, calls novelty and anti-establishment 'kick the bums out' billboards, Pozobrblog notes (and illustrates) - which propelled it into parliament and into government last year - is a near perfect illustration of the rise of what my SSEES colleague Allan Sikk calls 'newness as project' in the Baltic and beyond - the rise (and fall of) new disposable, use-and-discard parties, who've taken the notion of parties as a public utlity (an expression used by Ingrid van Biezen in relation to the increasingly detached, statecentric nature of moden party organization) to its logical end. Parties are as about as programmatic or as permanent as the mobile company: funkiness, celebs, a certain brand identity, but basically the same product at the same price.

I can to get through Wordpress's reader registration procedure to comment, directly dirctly at Pozorblog but it occurs to me is that such funky new post-modern parties still require a very basic old style factor to produce and splash high quality advertising: money. Although celebrity and media savvy might, I supposed compensate, for hard cash to some extent, the real story might be rise of various pocket sized Baltic Berlusconis, each getting their fifteen minutes of ... power.

It's also interesting to think of how and why such projects have failed in some contexts: Vladimír Želeny's Independent Democrats' party in the Czech Republic , for example, had similar ingredients, but scrapped a couple of MEPs in 2004 (one an ex-newsreader, one the media mogul himself) then pretty disappeared from sight until VŽ poached the Libertas.cz trademark.

Israelis seek winning formula for interest parties

Ha'aretz carries an interesting report about how various Israeli politicians are trying to repeat the success (unlikely to be repeated) of the Israeli pensioners' party GIL in 2006 with a formula by combining interest politics with a dash of populist razzmatazz. This time a disabled people's party and a couple of constitutional reform cum clean government parties seem to be taking the field. The conflict in Gaza, however, seems to have dampened the Israeli electorate's appetite for novel micro-parties this time, howoever

If I only had a brain...

In the wake of a not too well received panto last year, this year he theatre Royal Brighton has the Wizard of Oz as its big festive show . For copyright reasons, they stick closely to the film script with only a few panto-ish touches supplied by producer (the Good Witch of the North looked suspiciously like a Good Fairy) and audience (the Wicked Witch of the East got roundly boo-ed on every appearance).

"You'll be blown away" the poster said. Well, not quite. But it was a good time was had by all. My daughter and my niece knew the story and liked the songs, munchkins, flying monkeys, melting witches and other fairytale stuff. I liked it, of course, Wizard of Oz is actually a political allegory. A populist parable about the advance of financial and industrial capitalism in the late 19th/early 20th century US and a covert pre-Keynesian appeal for economic reflation by issuing currency backed by silver (as well as gold). As Hugh Rockoff of Rutgers University explains in The Journal of Political Economy (98: 739-60, 1990) Dorothy represents traditional rural American values, Toto the Teetotalers, an influential compoenent in the US Populist movement, the Scarecrow the farmers; the Tin Man the industrial workers; the Cowardly is Lion William Jennings Bryan the Populist Democratic and unsuccessful four time presidentiial candidate; the Munchkins are the citizens of the East Coast the Wicked Witch of the East is Democrat Grover Cleveland; the Wicked Witch of the West is Republican politician and later US President William McKinley; the Wizard Marcus Alonzo Hanna, chairman of the Republican Party; the Yellow Brick Road is the gold standard; Oz is, of course, the abbreviation for an ounce of gold (or anything else).

Others see the 1939 film, a Depression era musical concoction with multiple writers which drew on various of the many Wizard of Oz books written by L. Frank Baum earlier in the century, as a a satire on the New Deal and the technocratic Keynesian fixes it (the fraudulent Wizard adulated by the people being FDR, whose magic is less effective than good ol' family and rural values that finally will Dorothy back to Kansas). And, of course, there are more recent parallels. Rajiv Chandrasekaran's devasting reportage of the inadequacies and self-delusion of US occupation administrators cocooned in Iraq's Green Zone, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, also has a WoOZ allusion (Is George W. the Scarecrow or the Wizard, though?).

For anyone interested, there's an excellent overview of economic, political and religious allegories in the WoOZ by Quentin P. Taylor of Rogers State University, as well as a Wikipedia article on the same subject, and useful hub site with links to various critics' essays here. And, if you're really interested there's also an academic book on the subject: Ranjit S. Dighe (ed.) The Historian's Wizard of Oz — Reading L. Frank Baum's Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory, (Praeger Publishers, 2002). Wow.

In truth, however I was most taken with bit of social satire at the end when the Wiz tells the Scarecrow not to too worry about his lack of brain:

"Why anybody can have a brain - a very mediocre commodity. ( … ) Back where I come from we have universities - seats of great learning - where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. But - they have one thing you haven't got - a diploma!’. "

He then awards the Scarecrow a Th.D., Dr. of Thinkology (Mind you, only an honorary one. - nothing too unethical here). Not sure if this is promoting wider participation in higher education drawing attention to the problem of degree inflation or just a good of populism anti-intellectual smack in the face. Still, I laughed anyway and was still smiling when forked out for some very overpriced magic wands on the way out...

Update: And, for anyone, who doesn't like political and social allegory, there is a more or less politics-free radio essay on the Wizard of Oz, by Salman Rushdie for next week here on the BBC Radio 4 website.

Of parties, populism and partocracy

Slovak political scientist Miroslav Kusý writes a commentary about ‘partocracy’ in Slovakia in the liberal daily Sme. This theme, once a favourite uniting ex-dissidents, liberals and anti-political populists with a more rough hewn character, has receded from academic and intellectual debate in the past few years in favour of a slightly different take on the problem of (supposedly) defective and sub-standard democracy in CEE: populism a.k.a. ‘the populist backlash’.

Kusý’s definition of ‘partocracy’ is a fairly straightforward one: party government carried out for not the people but for parties- i.e. parties failing in their tasks of representing and aggregating the popular will (or some portion of it). A principal-agent problem, as we call it in the trade. Then, however, we descend into partisanship. The current coalition led by Robert Fico's populist-cum-social democrat party Smer Kusý says is an example of partocracy because it lacks ideologically common position with its smaller nationalist coalition allies and is united with them by a thirst for office, as (supposedly) proved by various scandals.

Kusy also cites a recent article in the Czech intellectual weekly Literární noviny by Czech political scientist and ex-Havel advisor Jiří Pehe who regrets that parties have given up on ‘their traditional role of forces in society’ (and, yes, the language original Czech really does have that odd echo of the Communist Party’s ‘leading role’) but are instead (shock horror!) reacting to public opinion ‘to appeal to the largest possible number of people’. (Pehe’s piece is a rather dull piece retreading the Czech ‘party versus civil society’ Klaus-Havel debate of the 1990s, arguing that social modernization makes parties less necessary and a political role for NGOs, citizens and intellectuals more necessary).

Kusý himself laments the ‘vulgar vocabulary, party polemics instead of civilized dialogue, and insults instead of substantive argument’. Alas, as argument about democracy or explanation of developments in either contemporary Slovak (or Czech) politics none of this really washes. It’s hard to think of any concept of party competition by big parties that doesn’t involve appealing to large numbers of voters or many established democracies, where party political communication takes place at the level of an academic seminar without a dose of knockabout polemics. Pehe’s assertion that Western political parties have opened themselves up to civil society seems fairly questionable- who can he have in mind? Possibly Greens in a very early stage of development? And political polarization - contrary to what he seems to think - as often or not tends to increase political participation and the increase in turnout at the last Czech elections showed.

The argument in Sme about ‘partocracy’ is also pretty lame. Ad hoc, unprincipled coalitions do not add up to ‘partocracy’. The term was widely applied to clientelistic party systems with an element of cosy consensus between governing parties say as those of post-war Italy or Austria, but has an intellectual heritage going back the early 20^th century. In a CEE context one of thinks of critiques of interwar Czechoslovak democracy, both in 1920s and 30s and in more exaggerated form after 1945 (Evard Beneš’s Democracy Today and Tomorrow - Beneš being one of the few political scientists ever to become head of state. He wrote a thesis about political parties in 1913. Woodrow Wilson comes to mind as another President-politolog). Havel’s writings both as dissident and President take up this tradition: his elegantly written fulmination against party government in his 1991 set of essays Summer Meditations, although not unprescient, was striking for the fact that it came when Czech parties had barely formed.

As conventionally used ‘partocracy’ refers not just to a vaguely defined lack of principle in coalition-making but to politicization of the state and/or party penetration of civil society by client-patron networks and a failure of representation. Both (especially the first) are problems in contemporary CEE, but the Sme article entirely bypasses these issues. More to the point, however, love it or hate, Fico’s rationale for forming a coalition with nationalist parties does have a pretty clear programmatic logic: the nationalist HZDS and SNS did after all his more statist (ahem, ‘social-democratic’) economic policies. A pragmatic power seeking logic of the kind the Kusý piece envisages probably would have led to the politically less costly option of a coalition of Smer with some outgoing parties of the right or centre. As for a failure of representation, Smer’s high opinion poll ratings suggests that such principal-agent problems are not bugging the median Slovak voter, whom seems to feel represented rather well.

All in the all, the problem seems to be that Slovak liberal commentators don’t like Smer and their Czech equivalents dislike both major parties of left and right. I think I share these dislikes, But they would probably do well to set out why, rather than dressing things up as a unique crisis of post-communist democracy complete with ill fitting notions of ‘partocracy’.

Slovakia 15 Years On - or how we learned to stop worrying and love populism

Somehow without quite realising I agreed to co-organise a one day conference at SSEES on Slovakia 15 Years On. However, with the help of the British Czech and Slovak Association, the Slovak Embassy and colleagues from SSEES and elsewhere, this turns out to be a whole lot less onerous that I had feared and on the day the event itself both interesting and successful and we are even lucky enough to get a keynote address from the current Slovak Ambassador to the UK, Juraj Zervan.

The ambassador, suffering (like me) from hay fever, reviews Slovakia’s development as a small Central European nation bringing it up to date with a discussion of the current ‘dynamic and stable’ government, which he says is building upon earlier reforms while developing a less passive foreign policy than the previous government and not losing sight of the social side of economic development. My scribbled notes also say that he stressed the importance of using state monopolies to forward the development of the economy, but it is not clear (at least from my notes whether this means using existing state holdings, or actively developing them.

Over lunch I hear less sanguine views about the current government from others: it has no real interest in foreign policy and is mainly interested consolidating its domestic position (very successfully so far) in controlling the finances of ministries and doing advantageous deals with the Russians over gas without much of an eye to longer term energy security. On the other hand, Tomáš Valášek of the Centre for European Reform reminds us the afternoon session, Slovakia has an excellent corps of EU-minded diplomats and previous Slovak governments’ focus in democracy promotion in SE Europe (while successful) overlooked the question of Ukraine, whose future Slovakia a more direct interest in as far as its own security is concerned.

The rest of the politics session centres on the question of populism in Slovak politics. As Tim Haughton notes, this is less related to the EU, whose influence on domestic politics is somewhat tangential and ad hoc than the general trend of democratic politics across Europe to ‘go populist’. As Kevin Deegan-Krause explains in a presentation that is theoretical, accessible and witty, populists appeal tend to move around the political landscape depending on who is in power (and part of the establishment) and who is not and can use various bits of kit from the toolbox of populists appeals (there are many). Holding government office tends to wear down populist lustre and new parties therefore do best as populist insurgents. The big exception to this rule, is of course, Fico’s Smer, which has bucked the trend and remained popular and populist in office. The reason, as Karen Henderson highlighted, in her presentation on the disarray of the Slovak opposition, is that populist parties reflect social and electoral demand. It matters little that the opposition can depict Fico as a semi-democratic ‘Mečiar lite’ (my phrase, not hers) and win international support, when they lack any coherent unifying political project - either for themselves or society - and Slovak voters are elsewhere. Interestingly, although some Slovak officials and politicians can rather sensitive about discussion of the current government - seemingly fearing an outbreak of Fico bashing as soon as any Western political scientist takes the floor - intellectual undercurrents seem to be shifting towards taking Smer much more seriously.

The day it should be said also included a morning session on culture: presentations on the refraction of Slovakia’s transformation to a consumer capitalist society through fiction with an outwardly trashy and sensational edge; a clever and interesting sounding novel with a mentally handicapped narrator, which, again, offers a skewed, satirical perspective on Slovak society and reveals much more going on than first meets the eye; and the work of the Slovak composer Eugen Suchoň, the centenary of whose birth is rapidly approaching.

In the margins of the conference I also learn that Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico ate a lot of kangaroo steaks whilst a visiting scholar at SSEES in 1999; that a Slovak designed the dollar bill; that (allegedly) a fifth of Slovaks are of aristocratic descent and that some Slovaks may be allergic to the metals in the new Euro coins and will need to watch out for skins complaints when the single currency is introduced in Slovakia in 2009 (now a source of predictable anguish in parts of the Czech press - the fact that the Slovaks are ahead in European integration, that is, not the skin allergies). And for anyone who can't work out the puzzles of Slovak politics or culture, there is always the rather neat (and rather cheap) Slovak-themed puzzle I came across from Puck Puzzles, which illustrates this post.

The European dog that doesn't bark

Yesterday sees me acting as discussant at a workshop on the Europeanization of parties in Eastern Europe at SSEES sponsored by the CEELBAS consortium, although as quickly transpires the story is actually one of non- or minimal Europeanization. The EU and ‘EU-related issues’ ) have not demonstrably changed party politics in CEE in the way that the EU has leveraged and shaped the region’s public administration and public policy.

The EU as an issue in domestic party politics in CEE has, however, been non-existent or at best a here-today-gone-tomorrow controversy which surfaces then quickly disappears around the time of accession. In many CEE countries, smallness and the consensus carried over from getting in to the EU couple with the public's standard lack of interest in the EU on the part of voters combine to make the EU a total non-issue, whose main impact is provide an occasional reference point for politicians berating each other's performance and an career option for politicians with an eye on the European Parliament or the European Commission.

As Agnes Batory’s excellent paper put it, as far as parties are concerned it Europeanization is, bluntly put, ‘the dog that didn’t bark. They haven’t changed very much or changed in obviously EU-related ways and the ‘anti-EU’ populist backlash that various academics and journalists have detected in various recent electoral upheavals can, looked at through different spectacles, be perfectly adequately explained by domestic factors - something I suspect that is also true of the coalition deals struck in 2005-6 with various dodgy minor parties in Poland and Slovakia most often cited as an EU-related, although as one paper rightly noted this seemed to fit in more to a process of the ‘de-Europeanization’ of party competition. I also Agnes Batory’s paper for tracking the ‘dog that doesn’t bark’ tag back to Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze - political scientists really should read more detective stories. I’ve heard there is one academic the US who bases his entire research methods course on episodes of Columbo- plenty of different modes of deduction and induction to study from the good Lieutenant

Back at the seminar, however, the €64,000 question is, of course, ‘so what’? What if Europe isn’t reshaping party politics in CEE, why should we care? I put both questions and got an excellent several-party answer from Stephen Whitefield: there may be implications for democratic governance in CEE; there is a puzzle to solve because we would expect the EU to be picked up and politicized by political entrepreneurs and emerge (but then disappear) as a political issue amid the electoral churning of the more volatile party systems of the region such as Slovakia, Poland or Estonia. The EU in CEE Stephen suggested - at least, as far as my illegible notes suggest (please correct me if you read this) was more part of a politics of democratic deficits and populism, whereas in Western Europe politics (and the way the EU played in domestic politics) centred on economic performance

Having exceeded my discussant’s brief and added to the mood of ‘Europeanization scepticism’, I had coffee and sandwiches courtesy of CEELBAS before leaving for the tropical heat of the fifth floor and a meeting of the SSEES post-graduate teaching committee.

Do Slovak and Czech Christian Democrats have a prayer?

The continuing dominance of Robert Fico’s SMER in Slovak politics – ably tracked and analyzed by Kevin Deegan Krause in the excellent Pozorblog – is aggravating an ongoing crisis of the sundry liberal and Christian parties that held sway amid a blaze oneo-liberal welfare and labour reform between 1998 – 2006. The splits and rivalries, seem basically about personal ambitions and rival personalities, but are punctuated by calls for generational renewal (is there a Slovak Barack Obama in the house?) and seem to also have an ideological/politcal subtext centring on one issue: about how to confront the populist/national-populist left, whose poll ratings and (worringly) dislike of NGOs and desire to heavy-handedly regular the press have uncomfortable echos of the dominance once exercised by Vladimír Mečiar and his HZDS (now seemingly relegated to a bit part in Fico’s coalition government).

The core of the Slovak centre-right is notionally Christian Democratic - there two mainly parties using the tag, the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), which has roots in the Christian dissidence before 1989, the more (socially) liberal Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ), formed as something of a personal vehicle for then Prime Mikuláš Dzurinda, although various neo-liberal technocrats seems to have hitched a ride with KDH too. The woes of the various stripes of Slovak Christian Democrats have interesting echoes in the current travails of the Czech Christian Democrats who, squeezed between powerful free market right and social democratic and communist left, have never had the whip hand in government and never been able to integrate liberal forces to broaden their appeal. The closest they came to a breakthough was in the ill-fated Quad-Coalition (4k) project in 1999-2001 when the two big parties of left and right were cosying up to each other. The exit from poilitics of the adroit Josef Lux in 1998 after being diagnosed with leukaemia (he died in 1999) finished KDU's prospects of being as much more than a niche party for Catholics in rural regions and confused centrist voters with nowhere to go. Despite good poll rating the fraught 4K project collapsed and split much like the Slovak Democratic Coalition, which indirectly it and spawned Dzurinda's SDKÚ

There followed faction fighting between more liberal (Bohemian-based) and more conservative (Moravian-based) elements in KDU; consequent frequent changes of leader (none, however, very personally commanding) and the lack of a clear strategy as to what Czech Christian Democrats actually stood for and whether they were of the left, right or centre (a perennial dilemma for small parties in a system with well established large parties) has seen the party's support dwindle to its core electorate leaving it hovering dangerously over the 5% threshold that spells political oblivion.

The directionlessness of the party was gruesomely illustrated by the sudden initiative of then KDU leader Miroslav Kalousek in 2006 to enter a Social Democrat-led minority coalition government with Communist support (it never materialized - he was sacked after an internal revolt) and its turning in desperation to newly elected Christian Democrat Senator and small town mayor Jiří Čunek, whose staggering popularity in the 2006 Senate election stemmed from expelling local Roma with chronic rent arrears from municipal housing in the town centre and re-locating them in the outskirts of town. Rapidly embroiled in corruption allegations stemming from his mayoral term(s) and squeezed out ministerial office (he was Minister of Local Development), but not the KDU leadership Čunek's small town populism has proved inadequate to re-launch his party. As highlighted in other posts the Civic Democrats - behind in the polls to the Czech Social Democrats (who, nevertheless, have not reached Fico-like levels of support) - are effectively marking time to see which of their minor allies, the Greens or the Social Democrats, will implode first and which they might somehow absorb to bolster themselves ideologically and electorally.

Ironically, KDU's long and detailed 2006 election programme, which, rather in the Slovak style, combined neo-liberal fiscal and welfare prescriptions (toned down to suit Czech tastes) as well as the usual social market, family protection, communitarian stuff was widely praised by experts as more realistic and better through through than the Civic Democrats' shot-in-the-dark version of flat tax-led neo-liberal reform.

And generational renewal? Commentators and politicians in CEE are always harping on about this, but it's hard to see quite how newer or younger will necessarily mean better. Such comments are, usually a disguised call for in political renewal or cleaner, better, more liberal government - amen to that, but even though there is no primaries system there is ample scope for new parties to emerge or young technocrats to parachute themselves into organizationally weak, elite-led parties. The Slovak experience suggests that many voters don't want renewal of this kind, but stability. Is the Slovak Barack Obama actually Robert Fico?

Klaus wins amid whiff of corruption and populist cameo

So, inevitably, Václav Klaus is re-elected in the third round of the re-run Czech presidential election with 141 parliamentary voters to Švejnar‘s rather paltry 113. They vote in public - Klaus’s supporters are confident of winning and so don’t make a fuss, but the whole process is still painfully slow and still takes all day. VK still manages to pick up the vote of now expelled Social Democrat deputy Evžen Snitílý, most Christian Democrats and a few independent right-wing Senators carefully ‘minded’ by ODS parliamentarians to make sure they didn’t change their minds.

Snítilý joins a fairly long line of ex-party colleagues who have succumbed to the persuasion and blandishments of the right over the year. I can’t think of a single case of case of anyone defecting the other way from Civic to the Social Democrats. There is also the curiously incident of the non-appearance of Green deputy, Olga Zubová, which leave Green leader Martin Busík gobsmacked when he is informed of it by text message mid-way through the morning speeches. A Green Minister is finally dispatched to her home to find out what is going on. Apparently, she is ill due to post-operative complications from recent surgery, although Green leaders find the incident ‘inexcusable’ and ‘strange’ - which I take as a hint they suspect some kind of shady goings on. Her absence could have made all the difference by lower the attendence and hence the number of votes needed for a majority in the third round, but in the event it doesn't. Snítilý's vote for Klaus is arguably more crucial. In the lunch break TV commentators more or less openly speculate about whether this long-serving Social Democrat has been tempted to ‘secure his family’s future’ or just had a nervous breakdown. Ceské noviny reports most of the corruption allegations briefly here and also suggests that the going rate for a pro-Klaus vote is about 2 million crowns (around £55,000 sterling).

You almost believe the diagnosis of the Communists’ presidential candidate, Jana Bobošiková, the independent populist Euro MP and ex-news reader, that the Czech Republic is one small step from a mafia state. There was admittedly a great deal of exaggeration as various parliamentarians melodramatically confided their fears about the threatening texts and emails they had received for voting the ‘wrong’ way in the previous election and but true some loon(s) did sent some deputies and senators envelopes with bullets in. Moreover, the apparent nobbling of opposition MPs - an accusation that keeps surfacing in connection with the Civic Democrats in tight situations - did give Czech politics a distinct whiff of the post-Soviet . Perhaps, as the news magazine Respekt suggested, all we have is simply a shop window for Czech politics as it really is, although in truth it was probably the 2004 and 2006 Senate elections, whose majoritarian system benefited the Civic Democrats hugely, that sealed Klaus's re-election more than the big bucks or shady deals that may have pushed him over the finishing line and saved us from a third or fourth set of presidential elections.

With the Christian Democrats won over to Klaus (expect a generous new restitution settlement with the Catholic Church) Švejnar never really had a chance. Various commentators suggest that his challenge was a kind of heroic failure - it was impressive that it materialized at all, a shrewd move by the Greens who first floated his candidacy, a clever play by the Social Democrats, who swallowed their dislike of Švejnar’s economic liberalism and tried to use the election to derail the government (as Klaus’s election derailed theirs in 2003)., and so on. I am rather sceptical about this, however. There are no second prizes in politics - the only and obvious winners are Klaus and ODS. Even the Communists, who seem to have not bothered to vote for Švejnar in the end, missed out on their previous role as kingmakers due to lack of parliamentary voters and a rather blatantly fielded set of public demands.

Possibly, the only other winner may be Jana Bobošiková, who bowed out as Communist standard bearer even before the voting had started, but gained some useful publicity and dealt very confidently and professionally with media questioning about her (basically pointless) candidacy. She was an interesting choice for the Communists, who in previous presidential elections have usually settled on some crusty academician. Bobošiková, by contrast has the demeanour of Anna Ford and the politics of Robert Kilroy-Silk with perhaps a touch of Imelda Marcos. She was elected to the European Parliament in 2004 on the populist eurosceptic Independent Democrats (ND) list of by ex-TV magnate Vladimír Železný, but broke with Železný, who checkered business and political career is full of such breaks, she is now associated with the tiny Politika 21 party, which briefly came to fame when the ex-wife of Civic Democrat PM Miroslav Topolánek stood as a Politika 21 candidate in the 2006 Senate elections. Leaving the far-right Republicans, who were very much a phenomenon of the 1990s and finally pegged out as a parliamentary force in 1998, the Independent Democrats were perhaps the closest the Czech politics has come to a populist upsurge of the kind seen elsewhere in CEE.

Populism in CEE: an illiberal helping of democracy?

A recent special issue of Journal of Democracy asks whether Central and Eastern Europe is backsliding on democracy and market reform. The apparent rise of populist forces across the region seen much journalistic ink spilt over the past year or so and in October’s JoD a heavyweight line-up of CEE academics and intellectuals (Martin Bútora, Jacques Rupnik, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Ivan Krastev, Vladimir Tismaneanu and others) weighs in to tackle the subject. The irony is that this comes just as the ‘populist backlash’ seems to be waning. Leading populist baddie Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his Law and Justice party were soundly beaten by pro-Western liberal-conservatives in Poland’s election while Robert Fico has successfully and humiliating bullied Vladimír Mečiar into staying in his coalition by making clear that he is prepared to jettison him, kept the far-right Slovak nationalist on a tight rein and is likely to see his party readmitted to the Party of European Socialists early next year. The JoD essays therefore come across as sensible but uninspired and jaded.

All agree (surprise) that there is no post-Soviet slide into authoritarianism in CEE, only questions over the quality of democracy in the region. They are less clear what might be causing this - the factors most cite include the failure and lack of vision of the local political class; the weakness of civil society and lack of checks and balances and ‘counter-majoritarian institutions’; the withdrawal of EU conditionalities now most states in the region are Union members; and - that very old chestnut - the ‘Leninist legacy’ resulting in uncivic mentality and an ideological vacuum filled by populist appeals patched together as ersatz mixture of liberalism, nationalism, fascism and communism. A more interesting question is the relationship of populism(s) in Western Europe and CEE. After all civic disengagement, alienation from politics and populist far-right parties have been a more important feature of wealthy Austria, Belgium, France or Norway than the poorer CEE region? Romania and Serbia are perhaps the key exceptions.

Slightly confusingly (and contradictorily), phenomena such as political polarization and problems building majorities are lumped in by some contributors as symptoms of ‘populism’. The one really truly arresting piece is by Ivan Krastev, who argues that populism is not only part and parcel of democracy - rather than part of a malaise or defect - but is functional and beneficial in representing neglected demands, drawing alienated citizens into politics. Populist concerns about elite accountability are as legitimate as liberal concerns about the governability of society and the tyranny of majorities. The problem says Krastev is that liberalism in the region has been too successful in presenting liberal reform as imperative with no legitimate alternative (necessary as part of the transition from communism, necessary for EU accession etc), leading discontent from losers to well up as an anti-political upsurge of electoral protest against the political establishment - the ‘ritual killing’ of governments as Krastev puts it. Ironically, liberal decommunization and anti-corruption initiatives have fed this process. The biggest problem thinks Krastev is the ideologically distance opening up between elites increasingly sceptical of democracy - presumably inclined to technocratic solutions and free market bypassing of politics - and mass publics increasingly sceptical of democracy.

Less a question of Putin-esque illiberal democracy than an awkaward mix of democratic illiberalism and liberal elitism, it seems.