An Arab 1989? Look to Bucharest not Berlin

I know  very little about North Africa and the Middle, but like many people interested in comparative politics and political change I have been watching the turbulent and unexpected development in Tunisia and Egypt  - and their smaller ripples elsewhere in the Arab world. Even Albania seems to have been affected by the demonstration effect. Moreover, area specialists, as with East Europeanists in 1989, seem to have been caught slightly on the hop, but the speed and decisiveness of events.

Tunisian Interior Ministry employees protest

Much comment, in the absence of any real knowledge,  seems to be a kind of echo chamber for the preoccupations of whoever's doing the commenting. The centre-left Twittersphere, for example, is awash with expressions of #solidarity and breathless updates about tanks in Suez from people who see popular mobilization against a corrupt semi-authoritarian regime in Cairo as a loose parallel for the kind of mass civic protest movement against austerity measures and spending cuts they would like (but have so far failed) to create in the UK.   showdown with the Coalition does indeed materialize in 2011. But, of course, Hosni Mubarak's regime and its imminent demise about hiking tuition fees, shutting down libraries and privatizing woodland. And then there is the small matter of rigged elections, secret police  torture, rampant corruption etc.

Still, I am basically no better. My attention homes in speculation of an 'Arab 1989', a '1989 moment' or comparisons with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The basic parallel is that of sudden, unanticipated regime collapse spreading across a region through domino (aka 'demonstration' ) fueled by people power. The analogy is, however, a rather lazy - even dangerous - one. The same '1989' paradigm was in the mind of the US Neocon policymakers as planned the invasion of Iraq (and neglected to plan the post-invasion). 

However, as far as I can judge, the East European parallel tends to underline differences in the developments we are seeing now: although the semi-reconstructed Tunisian government coming under pressure from the streets had echoes of  the early stages Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, most transitions in 1989 were negotiated elite deals with little or no mass popular protests driving events. Well-organized and credible oppositions either existed or quickly emerged and there was a wide social and political consensus about the future direction. In Egypt opposition parties seem weak while civil society groups  - much better organized than in communist Eastern Europe - seems reluctant to unite and step into the vacuum and there seem to be few obvious big policy ideas lurking below the notion of 'reform'. Moreover, the much younger demographics of the Arab societies seemingly now entering political transition seems to give issues like youth unemployment a bigger profile than

If they resemble 1989 at all, events in Egypt and Tunisa seem most reminicent of Romania in 1988-9 - a parallel spotted by a piece in the Baltimore Sun -  usually considered an exception and outlier in Eastern European 'revolutions of '89': a personalized dictatorship with dynastic overtones; spontaneous, chaotic and somewhat violent popular protest; a key role for the police and army and their willingness (or unwillingness) to keep order; and a new regime recruited mainly from second rank figures fromt he old bureaucratic power stucture.  Except that - although European Neighbourhood Policy will now no doubt turns its  eyes South in a big way - there is no equivalent to the magnetic prospect of EU membership that dragged Romania into being a minimal but real liberal democracy. Similar points are made in an interesting piece by Florian Bieber.

EU enlargement: The glass Füle than you might think?

EU Enlargement Commission Štefan Füle comes to Chatham House and along with a fairly large, most diplomatic, audience of 60 other people I go to hear him. The relatively large number of attendees means that the Chatham House rule is off and the remarks are on the record, although the Commissioner ignores his publicly prepared remarks and gives a fairly substantive case-by-case ex-tempore  the enlargement state of play one year in to the new Commission's term. There few major surprises, but nothing to evasive either in a workman-like working through of issues

Enlarement was, he said, broadly going well. The name of the game was, however, to beef up the credibility of the enlargment process, learning lessons from earlier enlargments. This has been doubt with clear benchmarks for opening and closing chapters in places, whcih didn't exist previously. Serbia, once it gains canidate status, could he thought have the capacity and political will to make fairly fast progress in negotiations. Iceland would be an interesting and special case - as a European Economic Area member it has adopted a third of the acquis already and another third was being swifting negotiated. However, the Icelandic public - while in favour of talks about membership - was less keen on membership itself and the Icelandic government's need to balance between acquis and voters was  something the Commission needed to bear in mind when closing an eventual deal.

The forthcoming Hungarian and Polish presidencies were an ideal opportunity - indeed, perhaps the opportunity - to advance the Eastern Partnership up the EU agenda. In future, such differentiated approaches to different Neighbourhoods around the EU would become more common and more developed, as the position and needs of the East was different from that of the South,where the relationship with the EU would not go so far (No mention of Tunisa, or the questions around Hungary's current government either from SF or questionners). As regards Turkey the ball was really in Ankara's court and there needed to be movement to unblock various issues: the bigger size and foreign policy vision of Turkey made it a different case, but he had not entertain the possibility that the Turks would walk away from accession, still less - as one questionner asked -  that if they did it might benefit other would-be and candidate members (presumably by lowering the stakes of enlargement). A more thought through and coherent policy going beyond the reactive measures  seen in the pasr was needed on Belarus - previously Lukashenka had always retained the initaitve and, while concessions had been extracted, the status quo was not acceptable. Kosova/o was sufficiently thorny, that the Commissioner decidied to leave it to the Q & A but , in the event, there were none.

The Commission left more or less bang on schedule at 15.10 with his car outside. Round the corner my bus was also pretty much instantly there.

Culturomics: Count me in

'Denocracy': 1800 - 2000

Between  Christmas shopping and some intense research on interest groups and welfare institutions, courtesy of The Economist, I come across the excellent Culturomics site. The idea is simple: to track and visualize mention of keywords in the digitized Google books in any time period from 1800 collect using a simple trendline. Feeding in some political science keywords priducing some interesting, but not totally unexpected - and, in truth not totally meaningful - results. "Democracy" produces a wave pattern rquite eminiscient of Huntington's Three Waves, although suprisingly there is no big upward spike around 1989. 

Marxism, at least as a keyword, is in decline from 1980s, perhaps reflecting a cultural-intellectual climate that passes through the collapse of communism but continues to our time: plenty of anti-capitalist around these days but fewer Marxists and revolutionary socialists, I suspect. 'Communism' has a similar profile, although, interestinglt, here it's all down hill after around 1968.

'Marxism': 1800 - 2000

You can also compare trends: running Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky against each other (citation wise) yields a few mildly interesting patterns with Vladimir Iliich and Josif Vissonarovitch closely running in parallel, but with some curious point where gaps open up. Stalin, as you might expect, does better in 1930 and 40s. Trotsky, unsurprisingly, bringing up the rear, but with a steady growth of interest from 1960s.

'Stalin' (blue), Lenin (red) and Trotsky (green): 1920-2000

How good a research tool is this? Certainly an interesting way of brainstroming cultural trends and - with sone tweeking -  literature reviews, although too broad brush to rely on that much. And, of course, for cultural tool it is hopeless insensitive to culture or, to be more precise, to contingent historical meanings: 'democracy' or 'communism' does not mean the same thing to different writers and may refer to fundamentally different ideas in, say, 1860 and 1960s.

Also available in Russian, German and Spanish.

Space for the Czech far right, if I'm not far wrong

A few weeks before the Czech elections earlier this year, I was asked if I wanted to write a briefing on the electoral prospects of the Czech far-right - given the economic crisis, a risk consultancy  analyst wondered, they might (as in Hungary) be expected to make advances. 'Fat chance', I said, 'the Czech far right has been dead for more than a decade'. And, for once, my  prediction was right. While the liberal anti-corruption part Public Affairs did surge unexpectedly into parliament, the far-right was nowhere with somewhat over one per cent of the vote, all told. True, the recently banned and quickly re-reformed Workers' Party (DS), whose paramilitary style street parades and confrontations with Roma - and connections with  organized racist violence -  have attracted much local and international publicity did manage the best Czech far-right result in parliamentary elections for more than a decade and does seem to have pockets of support among. young people in technical colleges, school mock elections suggested.

But 1.14 per cent is hardly the stuff of headlines and pales into insignificance with the hundreds of thousands of votes the late, unloved Republicans, whom I blogged about in an earlier post  managed in the 1990s (peaking at 8 per cent) when they seem to a fixture on the parliamentary scene. However, the DS's obvious extremism, which has put in very much under the beady eye of the Czech police and security services, and apparent preference for street politics would seem to rule out put something of an obstacle in the way of electoral growth. In comparative European perspective, as the CR is an oddity because of the weakness of the far right/radical right.

Efforts to formulate some kind of united front of the Czech far-right -  capable of crossing the 1.5% and 3.0% barriers for minimal levels of state funding of electoral and party expense – of the kind abortively tried in the run-up to 2006 election seems not to have been attempted before this years elections. And the National Party (NS), which seemed a few years ago to be re-inventing radical right-wing populism with a smidgen of sophistication (more educated leadership and female leader) since folded due to lack of votes, cash and not being able to do the neo-fascist bootboy stuff well enough even to maintain a sub-cultural following in the manner of the DS despite some pretty foul rhetoric towards the end of its days about deporting Roma to India and the 'Final Solution of the Gypsy Quesiton'.

So can we rest easily in our beds knowing that, whatever they think, say  and do in private, Czechs will stay out of the embrace of the radical right, at least in the polling booth? Not entirely, if polling commissioned by the Czech Interior Ministry on racism, extremism and radicalism and the Czech public's attitudes towards them  is to be believed. Although operating with some rather blunt conceptual tools (radicalism = anti-government/establishment; extremism = anti-system etc) the findings make interesting reading.

The Czech radical right sub-culture and its organizations are comparatively unremarkable and very consistent in their views: collectivist, anti-capitalist, socially authoritarian xenophobic, racist with an especial animus towards Roma and ethno-nationalist. Some 8% of the Czech population are found to broadly share such attitudes with (interestingly) around 3/4of those willing (in theory) to actively support far-right organizations (the rest would potentially just vote for them). This, the report concludes, suggest a potential electorate for a putative successful far-right party of 8% - the peak level of electoral support actually attained by the Republicans (in 1996). However,  I would tend to see this a far bigger potential electorate than the 8% reported in the Czech media, since we seem to be talking about those ideologically very much in tune with the far-right.

Protest voters, we might conjecture could boost the 8% figure significantly in the right circumstances and, as the report depressingly confirms, much of the Czech public shares the 'anti-Gypsyism' (anticikánismus) that is the stock in trade of many CEE radical right groups: measures of the 'social distance' of respondents from minority groups finds that a whopping 45% of respondents take the 'I would remove them from the CR' option when asked about Roma, the most radical of the various statements of feeling offered (and not necessarily an actual policy they support).

There are also some indications that, as well as lacking the organizational and financial wherewithal to (re-)impact national politics - the far-right has so far miscalculated its strategy. The potential far-right electorate, the poll finds, is spread out across the age range, but radical right organizations ' activities are focused on the young, who, it seems often engage with it for the excitement, entertainment, esprit de corps without really buying in to its politics very much. In regional terms, the traditional 'problem regions' of East and North Bohemia are joined by traditional left-wing industrial region around Ostrava and, to a lesser extent, much of Moravia. Relatively prosperous South Bohemia also seems to be a region of electoral potential for the far-right.

Political Capital: Index of Welfare Chauvinism

However, if when and if it re-emerges - and in today's political climate it is not beyond imagination - the radical right would not I suspect be a Czech Jobbik, drawing on traditional far-right sub-culture with a youthful Facebooking using leadership, as seemed to have occurred in Hungary - the kind of subculture well capable of building an organization in the long term as occurred with the Front national in France in 1980s -  but from a sub-strata of Eurospectic, economically populist 'independents'  bubbling around the edge of the frayed Czech political system. According to Hungary's Political Capital think tank Czech top the poll for welfare chauvinism, although I guess that may be in part

Watching the election lauch of Eurosceptic Sovereignty bloc, led by ex-newsreader and former independent MEP, Jana Bobošíková, this year, I couldn't help wondered how long it might be  before the economically interventionist, nationalist and Euroseptic program of Ms B. might tap in to the Czech public's darker moods" as she fulminated against "pseudo-humanist and so-called politically correct waffle about human rights and minorities" in her trademark yellow dress.

British Tories' Luxembourg allies slip in unnoticed

As an occasional follower of developments in the British Tory-led European Reformers (ECR) group in the European Parliament, I was intrested to discover that  the latest addition to the ECR fold was Luxembourg's Alternative Democratic Reform party (ADR) Actually, the ADR joined back in June, but as it has no MEPs and Luxembourg politics is not something that even I- with my penchant for small parties and small countries - don't follow that closely, it passed me by. 

The ADR is, however, an interesting right-wing populist outfit, which has it origins in 1987 as grouping demanding the same level of pension rights for private sector employees and the self-employed  as for well looked after state employees. It later broadened out its politics into anti-establishment, anti-bureaucracy positions and is, of course, eurosceptic for these kind of reasons. Some Luxembourgois political scientists have seen it as a functional equivalent of a radical right party, which is unlikely ever to emerge in the Grand Duchy due to a rather distinct, cosmopolitan national identity; a great deal of wealth; and norm of having very large numbers of non-nationals (mostly West European EU-ers) as a fact of life. Still, the ADR has managed to raise concerns about immigrants it sees as less desirable, which seems mainly be have been a debate centring on asylum seekers and illegal migration - and some academic studies rather casually lump it in with the anti-immigrant far right on the basis of expert surveys.

The ADR has never been in government - considered something of dodgy outsider by the country's political establishment - but has been a solid part of the Luxemboourg political landscape for more than two decades with around 10% of the vote. This leaves the ADR potentially well placed to to add an MEP to the ECR  (it missed out very narrowly in 2004 and by a slightly bigger margin in 2009) a grouping already not short of one-member national delegations.

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?

Colourful language at SSEES

Conceptual art has descended on the School of Slavonic and East European Studies - and not before time.  Artist Julia Vogl has created an installation entitled  Colouring the Invisible representing the different languages spoken by people passing through SSEES by affixing translucent sheets of coloured perspecxpanes in the building inner atrium. It is also a response to our 'architectural environment' apparantly. "...охуительно [fucking excellent]" comments a passing student - although I wasn't quite not sure if this referred to the artwork or something else. Still, I have have to agree with her. Next stop Christo and Jeanne-Claude to wrap the building for Christmas?

Czech local elections: Another flicker on the seismograph?

Did you miss them? How could you? Perhaps you were distracted doing something this weekend? The Czech local elections - spiced up by brace of Senate contests, which will (mostly) conclude with run-off elections next week - have been and gone. Admittedly, they didn't not quite repeat the political earthquake of the parliamentary elections in May, but there were a number of powerful tremors and further aftershocks bringing down unstable party structures cannot be ruled out.

 

The main story of the weekend seems to be the electoral battering taken by the Civic Democrats (ODS) in major urban centres, where they have historically dominated: with the exception of Plzeň, they were beaten into second place in all provincial capitals by the (still leaderless) Social Democrats (ČSSD)and, as in the parliamentary elections in May, beaten into second place in Prague by TOP09. ODS did, however, manage to be the standard bearer for the centre-right in most of the 27 Senate seats up for re-election, although in most they trail the Social Democrats badly and are likely to register big losses come the second round of voting next week. Interestingly, the Christian Democrats - dumped out of parliament in May - managed to make it into the run-offs against Social Democrats in a couple of seats in Moravia. In the face of some (by Czech standards) pretty tough-minded austerity, many Czech voters have saw-sawed back to the centre-left - or at least actually bothered to vote - suggesting that the social market instincts of the Czech electorate should never be underestimated. A quick glance at numbers of candidates fielded (see below) also, interestingly suggests that ČSSD  (light orange) now has a sustained national organisational reach it once lacked, although almost  half of candidates running were unorganised independents (not graphed).

TOP09, the new party formed by ex-Christian Democrats and independents formed in 2009 and led by aristocratic ex-Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg confirmed that, at least in the short-term it is a force to be reckoned with, with a biggish slate of candidates polling well across the country - with support centred in urban areas - but (with the key exception of Prague) failing to overhaul the Civic Democrats other than in the Moravian city of Zlín (home of the Bat'a shoe empire), where it benefited from the   unpopularity of a long-term Grand Coalition of Civic and Social Democrats and seems well placed to take control of the city in alliance with local independents. In the longer term, however, the lack of a significant further breakthrough to follow up its success in May may weaken the party.  On the other hand, the party can draw comfort from its relatively good electoral performance - and organizational spread - running separately from the Mayors and Independents bloc with whom it ran a joint parliamentary electoral list in May, although the Mayors notched up 1243 councillors to TOP's 1509 councillors despite fielding many more candidates. On the other had, a quick glance at figures for urban boroughs shows that TOP predominates in bigger cities and towns, where there is more local power and money (338 TOP borough councillors to the Mayors' modest 22).

The other new party swept in parliament in May, Public Affairs (VV), fared much less well. Despite fielding a reasonably number of local candidates for a new party, flopped badly in both Senate and local elections: even in Prague where it had its origins it barely scrapped together 5 percent  and thanks to a gerrymandering by the outgoing Civic Democrat administration (splitting Prague into seven electoral districts) failed to make it onto the Prague city council. The Greens suffered a similar fate, although after years of electoral marginality they are probably used to it and, unlike VV whose demise may only be a matter of time, will probably live to fight another day. 

Even star VV Senate candidate, ex-Foreign Minister and ex-Senator Josef Zeleniec failed to make it into the second round running in Prague. How he and various other politicians from small more established liberal centre-right parties must regret hitching their wagons to VV: the party's Prague electoral leader, Markéta Reedová, former leader of the European Democrats, anti-corruption campaigner and bugbear of the Civic Democrats during their less than squeaky-clean time at the helm of the Czech capital, looked shattered after the poll - as well she might having seen her former party (in alliance with the Greens) outpoll VV's well funded operation. TOP09 now seems likely to take over the mayoralty in Prague and there will, I predict, soon be a queue of  prominent ex-VV-ers beating a path to TOP09.

Still, in most places TOP and the Civic Democrats seemed doomed to co-operate with ODS having the upper hand in most places except Prague.

Where do good (fundable) ideas come from?

The annual School of Slavonic and East European Studies awayday takes place at the Art Workers Guild building in Bloomsbury: we sit in an oak-panelled conference with portraits and busts of whiskery Victorian gents staring down at us, although luckily there are a few more modern pieces displayed around theie fine building (see opposite). We are there  to discuss grants and how to get them. The question is how to communicate with your prospective funder and whether fundable ideas stem from careful dissection of funders' priorities or from interesting stuff that's been brewing up at the back of your brain, or a mixture of both. Our mock group grant assessment exercise suggests that, if reasonably coherently formulated, good ideas win out in the end, mainly  because non-specialists will immediately tend to get them.

Pop (social) science author Steven Johnson tells us good ideas are slow burning hunches, which have bumped into other people's hunches in spaces where 'ideas can have sex' and that 'chance favours the connected mind', explaining why C17th coffee house was a driver of intellectual innovation. YouTube has a nice five minute summary of his book (below), which seem a good way to save 20 dollars. But, of course,  when translation specialists are asked to relate their work to themes like statebuilding and policing in Afghanistan, it's not surprising people start wondering if there is a difference between good ideas and fundable ones?

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.

Off the map

In the spirit of David Černý's (in)famous Entropa installation (above) - which was in many ways the best thing about the ill-fated Czech presidency of the EU a while back unless you are a big fan of the Eastern Partnership - Bulgarian visual artist, graphic designer and illustrator Yanko Tsvetkov has come up a series of maps of Europe mapping the (supposed) prejudices of various nations (US, Brits, French, Germans and, Bulgarians, naturally) and, for some reason, also of gay men. Not inappropriately, the series seems to have been flagged by The Daily Telegraph.

Europe according to the Brits - Why are we always depicted as nation of europhobes? ... possibly because we are?

Europe as seen by the French: Zut alors! Does this have the ring of truth?

A similar Europe-As-Seen-By-Estonians (that's ethnic majority Estonians, I think) appeared on You Tube a while back (see below) - marvellous line about '...the country where Bjork and dragons live in harmony'.



And, of course, there is much weird and truly wonderful stuff on the Strange Maps blog (now also a book) such as the invaluable map of European alcohol belts (beer vs. wine vs. spiritis) - note the interesting beer/wine cleavages running through Northern France and the apparant identification of wine-drinking with ethnic Hungarians (although they should perhaps have marked South Moravia  in the Czech Republic more prominently as wine enclave) and Croatia seems oddly to have slipped into the beer zone.

Europe's alcohol belts (from Strange Maps)

The venerable tradition of satirical map making - covered by the excellent just closed British Library exhibition - is it seems to be alive and kick and taking over from straight political analysis.

Updates: As my SSEES colleague Eric Gordy notes, you can also get this type of analysis in fuller tabular form and, Catherine Baker informs over Facebook, the slightly neglected Croats have produced a map of their own . Oddly, they seem to remember us in terms of the British Empire, but  so much discussion about British politics betrays a  subconscious obsession with our fall from imperial superpower status, I guess that's OK.

Czech history lessons?

Lack of time and lack of expertise means I don't take more than a passing interest in academic history, but I note with interest the apparent outrage caused by a paper presented by French historian Muriel Blaive at a recent symposium held in London to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of Czechoslovak and Poland governments in exile Has the Czech Republic fully come to terms with the memory of the Second World War? The memory in question, the paper says, is the (so far unresearched) extent of Czech collaboration and passivity underNazi occupation and, specifically, with the implementation of the Holocaust. This theme, it is suggested, would violate established national narrative of Czechs as a liberal European nation, who were heroes or (more commonly) victims of a grim totalitarian double-whammy of Nazism and communism, and, in particular, undermine Czech moral credit in debates over post-war treatment and eventual mass 'transfer' of the Sudeten Germans.

There is well established set of arguments that (large sections) Czech society bears a certain responsibility for communism - enthusiatically backing the statist national democratic project of the Communist 1945 and falling too readily for reform communist illusions in the 1960s. Indeed, Muriel Blaive's earlier book (published in different versions in Czech and French) added to by suggesting that when Hungarians and Poles were taking to the streets in 1956, Czech society was unreactive not because deep democratic and anti-communist instincts were repressed, but because it was passive, inwardly and bought off by being (relatively speaking) well off. However, any suggestion that the Czechs were anything other victims of Nazism was, perhaps not surprisingly, moc silný kafe. Another implication, which you might take from the paper (although this is not explicitly given - merely mine) is that the agonised intellectual and historical debates over Czechs and (Sudeten) Germans which go back to the underground samizdat discussions of 1980s - including the self-searchingly self-critical ones - has obscured the need for one over wider Czech complicity

What should a political scientist make of all this? There is an interesting line of argument in the paper about the conversion and re-use of police and intelligence structures by successive regimes (democratic/Nazi/communist), which could feed interestingly into research on the nature of regime change state, especially given the current strong historical turn in the discipline. After all, wasn't one of the biggest mistakes the American made in Iraq the decision not to convert Baathist state structures?). And there clearly are some thoughts to be had about history, democractic quality, the partisan use of decommunization, the politicization of academic reseach institutions. At bottom, in a democratic society, there should, be no historical taboos - which in the Czech Republic clearly there still are - and historians clearly have a job to do, and that job includes looking at all the skelteons in all the cupboards. And there is a well rehearsed argument that openness and honestly about the past make for society better able to face up, discuss and solve its current problems.

On the other hand, you wonder quite what the Czech politicians and public are actually supposed to believe about themselves and their past? And especially, what if anything, they should feel positive about? Sure, Czech politics is animated by crude national-democratic myth, but - as the warm bath of nostalgic feel good documentaries about the Blitz and the Battle of Britain currently airing on British television shows - this isn't exactly unique. Admittedly, revisionist programming seeps uncontroversially into the schedules: watch the whole crop of WWII history and you can learn there was rampant crime and corruption during the Blitz; that British Blitz of German cities later in the war was more savage than than meted out by the Luftwaffe in 1940-1; that the Battle of Britain was won partly due to German incompetence in photo reconnaisance; that our military effort was buttressed by imperialism and racism and so on.

And, it would, of course be nice if British historical memory really wasn't dominated by the early years of the Second World war: WWI and WWII it is the only bit of modern history that most primary schools touch on, so it is no small wonder we are rapidly eurosceptic and have inflated sense of national importance. On the other hand, the use of academic history for endless repetitive masochistic, self-lacerating national self-criticism which some parts of the Czech intelligentsia delight in seems more likely a recipe for cynicism and anomie, rather than democratic renewal.

Perhaps, realistically, in what Phippe Schmitter once rather nicely termed really Existing Democracies, a safe disconnect between academic and popular history is all you should wish for.

Update:  Madelaine Albright's keynote address to the symposium can be seen in video here. It's a rather eloquent and well delivered presentation making  a well argued - if ultimately not totally convincing - case for traditional view of strong, if naturally imperfect, Czech democratic tradition derailed by geopolitical circumstance. A politician's rather than a historian's speech, but then as I say above that has its place.

Czech politics: The urge to merge?

The ink's hardly dry on the Czech coalition agreement and the Civic Democrats (ODS) haven't even yet been routed in the local elections - although we still haven't the foggiest who their candidate for mayor of Prague is - and already ODS MEP Hynek Fajmon is weighing in on his blog Spojit ODS a TOP09? Ne! Blog - Hynek Fajmon (blog.iDNES.cz) to say his party should not merge with TOP09. He's  dead right that it wouldn't work for organisational reasons - ODS is too structured and locally embedded, compared to TOP for merger to be an easy prospect and, for the same reasons, a loose electoral alliance like a join list would probably flounder. The stuff about ideological incompatibilities is - ODS is eurosceptic and anti-environmental, TOP a load of tree hugging europhiles - is, however, wishful thinking. True believers like Fajmon are becoming something of rare breed in ODS these days even in the rareified environment of the European Parliament. After all, the two parties signed a coalition agreement on time and in good order with most of the cracks down Public Affairs' esoteric demands on referenda and the the like.

And, call me a fashion victim if you will (curiously, no one ever does...), but with sweaters like the one sported by Mr F. on his blog, you do begin feel that the days of the Civic Democrats may indeed be numbered...I own a similar one myself.

Old PUPS, new tricks

Any Francophones out there interested in minor political parties may be interested to know of a short piece on pensioners' parties in the newsmagazine Alternatives internationales,  which, roughtly speaking, seems to a cross channel version of the New Internationalist. I did want to offer something centring on Slovenia's Democratic Party of Pensioners (DeSUS)- currently undergoing various ructions and splits in the centre-left Slovene coalition government - but they felt that Serbia's Party of United Pensioners (PUPS) was a bit sexier, so as Research Impact is the now  new rock 'n' roll  for academic hese days, I pnaturally obliged and pulled together what I know about PUPS. Should you cher ami not be a Alternatives internationales subscriber and want an electronic offprint, do drop me a line,

The EU: Viable or friable?

I should know better. I should only, only read books that generate immediate research outputs, the life blood of contemporary academia and never, not ever succumb to the temptation to read things that are simply interesting, But somehow this is one New Year’s resolution I never keep. So as well as reading Scandinavian crime novels and a book about the fall of the Roman Empire – actually rather instructive on issues of statehood for your average contemporary political scientist, I thought – I’ve also a soft spot for what Giovanni Capoccia recently termed the ‘historical turn in democratization studies’ , so it wasn’t the greatest of holiday chores to have to read Andrew Glencross’s  What Makes the EU Viable?: European Integration in the Light of the Antebellum US Experience.  

The book adds to a small but growing literature comparing the emerging EU political system with the experience of US federalism. However, Glencross says, the best period for such anachronistic historical comparison is not the early constitution-making of the Founding Fathers or the functioning  of modern US federalism, but the antebellum period – ie. the decades between the foundation of the American Republic and outbreak of the Civil War – when the relationship between member states of the union and political centre was most ambiguous and contested.

Such a comparison Glencross argues, means we need an expanded concept of ‘viability’ embracing not only the formal allocation of institutional and legal powers and ‘competences over competences’, but also actors’ understandings of the purposes of the union and whether popular sovereignty is ultimately invested in the centre, the member states, or both. Applying this framework, he identifies two distinct approaches to achieving viability in a semi-federal, semi-confederal state unions like the EU or the early US: ‘1) voluntary centralization’ where the different actors negotiate their way to a stronger, more integrated state; and 2) ‘dynamic equilibrium’ where institutional and political ambiguity – far from being a problem to be solved – is the key to viability.

The viability of the antebellum US, he argues, was in the end fatally undermined by an emerging politics of ‘voluntary centralization’, while the EU has survived precisely by sticking to a pattern of ‘dynamic equilibrium’. In this light, projects to fix the European Union through various forms of democratization and constitutionalization appear best irrelevant and at worst dangerous. There are, Glencross acknowledges, important differences between the two cases: the US was created through a constitutional instrument, the EU through an inter-state economic treaty; the US had a nationwide party system with a dominant cleavage (slavery) dividing member states, the EU has only an embryonic party system with many cross cutting divides between states. Nevertheless, he argues, the parallels are sufficient to merit serious rethinking about the reform of EU governance.

What Makes the EU Viable? is, admittedly, an uneven book given, in places, to opaque and overlong and over-defensive theoretical asides as books-of-PhD-dissertation often do. It would also benefit from more simply explained engagement with mainstream EU studies literatures and the burgeoning subfield of historical democratization. However, at bottom, I thought it succeeded in its objective of asking a big and timely question and deploys anachronistic comparison to deliver some genuinely unexpected and worrying answers. Academic viability, if ever I saw it.

Post-communist democratization: Is your name.. Rumpelputin?

Late at night I’ve been sitting up reading: reading Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World (Cambridge University Press) edited high-powered US specialists on communism and post-communism. McFaul is now a senior advisor to the Obama presidency at the National Security Council. This new collection – available in paper and hardback and Kindle – basically tries to regime change in the former communist world into a new perspective by linking the collapse of one-party rule in 1989-1991 with more recent experiences of democratisation in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. As the editors argue in the opening chapterswe should think of postcommunist democratisation as three overlapping phases: 1) the breakdown of Communist Party rule in the late 1980s; 2) democratisation processes in 1990s driven by the prospect of EU membership, which stopped some new democratic states in Central and Eastern Europe sliding into semi-authoritarianism; and 3) more recent ‘coloured revolutions’ in the former USSR, which were triggered by electoral fraud in states without any clear prospect of joining the European Union.

And what’s more Michael McFaul suggests, theses three phases underline the role of the international system as a missing (or at least, under-played) variable which has shaped the different waves: the collapse of Soviet power and  its later re-emergence under Putin; the EU’s decision to enlarge Eastwards; and a growing US preoccupation with the ‘War on Terror’ after 2001. However, contributors differ in their views of precisely how – and how strongly – international influences have come to bear. Milada Anna Vachudova sees EU leverage on CEE's more problem atic states as a key motor of liberalisation and reform, while– despite making points similar things in a slightly different language - Alina Mungiu-Pippdi at bottom claims that the EU’s political conditionalities were easily bypassed by anti-reform elites. Horizontal economic integration and broader European norms were, she claims, the important factors. Sadly, this is the type of domestic vs. European factors arguments that no one has convincing really worked out how to settle. Similarly, in his finely-researched chapter on Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution, McFaul is unable to conclude more than that US and international influences were indirect, although here one detects a certain politically inspired pulling of punches. There seems plenty of evidence in McFaul’s thoroughly researched chapter for arguing the case one way or other and if I was in the opposition in a semi-authoritarian state, I surely as hell would want USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy training my youth volunteers and election monitors and bunging a bit of cash to friendly NGOs.

As Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik note, changes the geo-political environments mattered because they altered the incentives of domestic actors and changed patterns of diffusion between states. Diffusion mechanisms – while always at work- evolved over time. Would-be democratic revolutionaries in Eastern Europe have been copying tactical innovations; drawing parallels between national contacts; and forming of collaborative networks since at least 1980, if not 1848. However, as various lcase study chapters on ‘electoral revolutions on  Slovakia (1998) and Serbia (2000), Georgia (2004), and Ukraine (2004) make clear by the millennium the transnational activist networks and election monitoring had become the key paths  for change.

However, post-communist authoritarians too have been learning lessons. As Kathryn Stoner-Weiss and Vitali study on Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus - and Lucan Way’s comparison of post-Soviet authoritarianisms - show, an effective formula for blocking democratisation is at hand:  the key ingredients are well trained, well paid security forces; regaining  Soviet-era levels ofcontrol of the media and the economy; a well organised new ruling party backed by some kind of an ideological claim to legitimacy s Nevertheless, extreme weakness of post-Soviet state institutions can be a still more fundamental obstacle to democratisation: Scott Radnitz  illustrates the point bluntly in a chapter arguing that Kyrgyzstan’s repeated ‘electoral revolutions’ are more a sign of failed statehood than social pewssures for democratisatio.

As the book shows, despite the Year of Miracles in1989 - the dominant image of regime change for Western obsevers - post-communist transition  has most often been a story of failed or partial democratisation creating semi-democratic ‘hybrid regimes’, whose closed political systems, semi-open societies and corrupt public adminstration set the scene for further democratic upheavals. The net effect of such waves, however, has been a gradual polarisation of the region's initially weak democratisers into consolidated (if low quality) democracies (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Slovakia) and consolidated autocracies (Russia, Belarus, Armenia).

As you would expect, Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World offers a wide-ranging and sophisticated overview of South East European and post-Soviet democratisation By joining up Europeanisation, ‘electoral revolutions’ and transitions from one-party rule in 1989-1991, it offers an original perspective highlighting the unfolding of a kind of Kondratievian long wave of democratisation across a single region. However, I found explanation and description in the book were too often blurred. Many of the causal factors its contributors highlight beg more questions than they answer. Why were some authoritarian elites more united in the face of opposition? Why were some security and police apparatuses more cohesive? Oil, victory in neighbourhood wars and timing all seem to be part of the bigger story. Too often, however, we are left with accounts where wily authoritarians like Putin or Lukashenka appearing Rumpelstiltskin-like at the wrong moment.  If only they would disappear as easily.

MOR than just ice cream and beer

What can you do in the Czech Republic over several sunny summer days, but eat ice cream, have the odd, beer, seek out the local lido, read all the newspapers and steadily do the usual tour of all the in-laws. Actually, things seem to getting a bit more difficult than they used to be: tougher hygiene regulations and the filtering down of EU structural funds to local politicians and busipeople have seen the closure of a lot of traditional open air municipal pools and their replacement with self-styled 'Aquaparks'  charging double the price which have plenty of water slides and flumes for the kids, but basically nowhere to swim. Even allowing for the traditional 'cucumber season' when there is little hard news, there seems less and less to read in the Czech papers and, if buy five national dailies, you should manage to read most of the interesting news in about half an hour. There even seems to be fewer brands of beer to choose from and the local Janáček brew - nothing to do with the composer in case you were wondering - has daftly rebranded itself as Patriot, presumably in an effort to combine regional appeal with an up-to-date, English sounding moniker. 

There is, however, a little politics to be seen on the highways and byways of Moravia: as we head down from wooded country into agricultural district in search of an old style koupák to swim in, I spot a billboard left over from the election campaign - probably paid for by the Social Democrats - slagging rising new parties TOP09 and Public Affairs (VV), by warning that popular TOP09  figurehead Karel Schwarzenberg will soon by given the chop by ruthless, much less popular TOP deputy leader Miroslav Kalousek. VV leader Radek John is also there in dark glasses, looking vaguely goonish.

In reality, post-election Mr - or, in fact, I should say Prince - Schwarzenberg seems to be quietly slipping out of the limelight of his own accord to get on with the business of running Czech diplomacy as Foreign Minister, and the thought of Radek John, now Interior Minister, as sinister backroom operating would make anyone smile given his bumbling and incompetent first month in office: his floundering performance in a TV interview struggling to explain what his ministry's strategy director did is already the stuff of legend.

The local elections scheduled for October also seem to throwing up some fascinating contests: all eyes are currently on the Alien Versus Predator type battle between the Civic Democrats and TOP09  that is taking shape in Prague, but in Zlín the long, long central boulevard of hypermarkets, industrial units and public building is replete with billboards for a new movement of local independents called Moral Clean-Up for City Hall (MOR), which despite the name seem to be a standard outfit of anti-politically minded worthies not a group of Christian fundamentalists: on the other hand, where does a scratch list of civic minded citizens get hold of the cash for a 30  billboards?  Not to mention a snazzz and professional webiste. The regional daily Zlínský deník said that MOR was 'funded by another electoral list' - presumably as some kind of spolier party'  - producing howls of protest for the new group, but hard information seems hard to come by.