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.
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| 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.
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.
