Tag Archives: czech social democrats

Slovakia

Kiska elected president of Slovakia in setback for Fico

Leave a comment

kiska

Robert Fico’s attempt to extend his control over both the Slovakian parliament and presidency failed Saturday, when former businessman and philanthropist Andrej Kiska (pictured above) overwhelmingly defeated Fico in the second-round runoff.slovakia flag

Though Fico narrowly led in the first round, Kiska won a decisive victory with 59.38% of the vote. Fico, the incumbent prime minister, won just 40.61%. Kiska, an electrical engineer by training, made his fortune in the installment payments / credit business. Eight years ago, he founded Dobrý anjel (Good Angel), a charitable organization that helps provide funds for the seriously ill.

Kiska’s victory parallels the rise of Andrej Babiš, also a former businessman, who became the deputy prime minister and finance minister of the Czech Republic after his new center-right party nearly won last October’s Czech parliamentary elections. Babiš, interestingly enough, is Slovak by birth. Though Kiska will have a relatively circumscribed role in Slovak politics, due to the largely ceremonial nature of the Slovak presidency, the emergence of figures like Kiska and Babiš could augur the rise of a new, pragmatic center-right in central Europe whose leaders come from the business world and not from the fraught economics and tainted politics (on both the right and the left of the immediate post-Cold War period).

Fico, the leader of Slovakia’s main center-left party, Smer – sociálna demokracia (Direction — Social Democracy), has led the country’s government for six of the past eight years. His defeat on Saturday will undoubtedly weaken his position as prime minister, given that his critics can argue the election was a referendum on Fico’s record. Smer won’t face voters again until 2016, but it was Fico’s choice to contest the presidential election, making his defeat on Sunday almost entirely self-inflicted.  Continue reading Kiska elected president of Slovakia in setback for Fico →

Czech Republic

Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt

Leave a comment

zemansoboktka

Normally, party leaders face the boot when they lose elections, not after they win them.czech

But that’s what happened in the Czech Republic, when the center-left Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) narrowly topped the country’s parliamentary elections in late October with just over 20% of the vote.

Though the Social Democrats won the election, they took just 50 out of 200 seats in the Poslanecká sněmovna (the Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of the Czech parliament, and only nearly edged out a new populist, anti-corruption, business-friendly party, the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), founded just two years ago by wealth businessman Andrej Babiš.

That left the leader of the Social Democrats, Bohuslav Sobotka, in a difficult position.  The fractured result means that the Social Democrats will have to find at least another 50 deputies in order to govern — and despite the willingness of the Social Democrats to work alongside the Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia) for the first time in the post-Soviet era, the 33 seats that the Communists won won’t alone be enough to float a Social Democrat-led government.

But what left his leadership truly in question was a split between two wings of his party, a pro-Sobotka wing that hopes to keep its distance from the Czech Republic’s new president, Miloš Zeman, and a pro-Zeman wing that seeks closer collaboration between the two.  Zeman led the Social Democrats over a decade ago, and he served as Czech prime minister from 1998 to 2002.  A falling-out with the ČSSD leadership in the mid-2000s, however, caused Zeman to quit the Social Democrats and form a new party.

Zeman triumphed in his own right in the January 2013 presidential election — the first such direct election in Czech politics — and has spent the greater part of the year trying to muscle even more power for the Czech presidency at the expense of the parliamentary government.

So almost immediately following the election, Zeman (pictured above, left, with Sobotka) and top members of the pro-Zeman wing of the Social Democrats, including the party’s deputy leader Michal Hašek, held a secret meeting.  That preceded a call for Sobotka to step down as leader on the basis that Sobotka’s personalized, centralized campaign led to a poorer-than-expected result.

The ‘coup’ soon fell apart, though — Hašek and other participants in the secret meeting with Zeman lied about it, Sobotka rallied his supporters  against Zeman’s interference in internal party affairs, Czech overwhelming blamed Hašek for causing political instability and so, for now, Sobotka remains leader and Hašek has stepped down as deputy chair.

Sobotka won a battle, but it’s far from clear that he’ll even be the next prime minister.  Continue reading Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt →

Czech Republic

Czech election results: a fractured and uncertain Chamber of Deputies

1 Comment

zeman

In September, voters in some of Europe’s most economically stable countries (Germany, Austria and even Norway) happily turned out to support their incumbent governments.  But in October, the Czech Republic’s election demonstrates that most of Europe remains under incredible social, economic and political stress.czech

Czech voters selected members to the lower house of the Czech parliament between two days of voting on Friday and today.  The result is a fragmented mess — it’s the most fractured election result since the May 2012 Greek parliamentary election, which resulted in a hung parliament and necessitated a second set of elections in Greece just a month later.

Here are the results:

czech 2013

Seven different parties — ranging from free-market liberals to communists to political neophytes — won enough votes to gain seats in the 200-member Poslanecká sněmovna (the Chamber of Deputies), but it’s not clear who will be able to form a government.  Voters clearly rejected the previous center-right government’s approach to austerity and budget discipline, but split over what they want to replace it.  Turnout fell below 60% for the first time in over a decade.

In purely political terms, the result gives even more power to Czech president Miloš Zeman (pictured above), who came to office after winning the country’s first direct presidential election in January.  On the list of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in this weekend’s election, perhaps no one is a greater winner than Zeman, who is entitled to appoint the prime minister and therefore, will shape the first steps in the coalition negotiations.

Since taking office, Zeman has pushed to empower the Czech presidency at the expense of the Czech parliament.  After the country’s center-right government fell earlier this summer, Zeman appointed Jiří Rusnok as his hand-picked technocratic prime minister, but Rusnok’s (and Zeman’s) inability to win a vote of confidence led to this weekend’s snap elections.  Rusnok has served as a caretaker prime minister for the past three months, and he could wind up serving quite a while longer if no governing coalition can be formed.

The center-left Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) technically won the election — but just barely, and with far less support than polls showed just a month ago.  Despite winning more votes than any other party, the Social Democrats won just one out of every five votes, and it’s the party’s worst result in two decades.  It’s not necessarily clear that the party’s leader, former finance minister Bohuslav Sobotka, will even have the chance to form a government.  There’s simply no credible case that the Social Democrats have a mandate for much of anything.

Though Zeman, a Social Democratic prime minister between 1998 and 2002, broke away from the Social Democrats only in 2007, the party remains divided over the extent to which it wants to associate with Zeman now that he holds the Czech presidency.  What’s certain is that the poor result will weaken Sobotka, who leads the anti-Zeman wing of the party.  That means Zeman could bypass Sobotka and appoint a friendlier Social Democrat as prime minister, such as deputy leader Michal Hašek or perhaps Jan Mládek, who was widely tipped to become the next finance minister.

The real winner in today’s election is the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), founded in 2011 by millionaire Andrej Babiš, which nearly overtook the Social Democrats in terms of support — they will hold just three fewer seats than the Social Democrats in the new Chamber of Deputies.  Babiš is one of the wealthiest businessmen in the Czech Republic, and he’s led a ‘pox-on-all-your-houses’ campaign that rejects the mainstream Czech political elite as corrupt and dishonest.  Babiš owns founded Agrofert, originally a food processing and agricultural company, but now a conglomerate that’s the fourth-largest business in the Czech Republic.  Though his platform is relatively nebulous, he’s called for reforms to reduce corruption and end immunity for politicians from prosecution.

Think of Babiš as a cross between former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Georgian prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, perhaps, and think of ANO as a more business-friendly version of Beppe Grillo’s Italian protest group, the Five Star Movement.  Given Babiš’s recent effort to buy a top Czech media company, the comparisons to Berlusconi have become particularly sharp:

A Czech tabloid recently nicknamed Andrej Babis, the new star on the Czech political scene, “Babisconi.” But, when compared with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, he quips: “I have no interest whatsoever in underaged girls.”

In third place is the Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia), which won about 15% of the vote, the party’s second-best result since the fall of the Soviet Union.  The party is the heir to the old Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which governed the country from 1968 until 1990 as a Soviet-aligned, one-party state.  Though the Communists have moderated their approach somewhat in the 21st century, and though they were expected to participate in a Social Democratic-led government, the party remains unapologetically communist (unlike other former eastern far-left parties, such as Die Linke in Germany, which espouse a more moderate form of democratic socialism).  Given that the base of the Czech Communists was once older, rural voters, its comeback today says much about the economic despair in the Czech Republic these days.    Continue reading Czech election results: a fractured and uncertain Chamber of Deputies →

Czech Republic

New Czech party hopes to ride anti-corruption momentum to election gains

2 Comments

Wallenstein view

It’s been a tumultuous year in Czech politics — a surveillance scandal involving the prime minister’s love triangle brought down the government, a power-hungry president elected in the first direct presidential election earlier this year is working to claw power away from the parliament, and what’s left of the Czech right boils down to a contest between an eccentric Bohemian aristocrat and a multi-millionaire entrepreneur. czech

Though it sounds like the long-lost plot of a Leoš Janáček opera, it’s the backdrop to this weekend’s parliamentary elections, which should be no less dramatic than the events that shaped them.

What was once expected to be an easy victory for the country’s main center-left party, the Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) now looks it will be a less dominant victory — so much that the Social Democrats are no longer considered a lock to lead the next Czech government.  It’s the latest twist in a series of turns that could have major consequences for the economic and political development of the Czech Republic (or ‘Czechia‘ as its current president wants to call it) and its 10.5 million residents, to say nothing of the future expansion of the eurozone within central and eastern Europe. Continue reading New Czech party hopes to ride anti-corruption momentum to election gains →

Czech Republic

Why Miloš Zeman won the Czech presidency

5 Comments

miloszeman

Czech voters returned to the polls yesterday and today for the runoff in the Czech Republic’s first direct election for president.czech

Former social democratic prime minister Miloš Zeman has defeated the current more conservative foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg by a margin of around 54.8% to just 45.2% for Schwarzenberg.

Schwarzenberg emerged as a surprise challenger to Zeman after the first round, edging out former prime minister Jan Fischer, setting up a runoff that  featured two candidates with incredibly colorful personalities.

Schwarzenberg, who belongs to the Bavarian nobility, spent much of his life in Austria, where his family lived in exile during the Communist occupation of Czechoslovakia, increasingly fighting in the 1980s alongside Václav Havel to liberate the country from Soviet rule.  As the leader of the Tradice Odpovědnost Prosperita 09 or ‘TOP 09′ (Tradition Responsibility Prosperity 09), which he formed for the 2010 Czech parliamentary elections, his party is the second-largest member of the coalition headed by prime minister  Petr Nečas, the leader of the Občanská demokratická strana (ODS, Civic Democratic Party).

Zeman, formerly a prime minister from 1998 to 2002 from the Czech Republic’s main center-left party, the Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party), is known for his sharp wit and aggressive persona, but lost his first run for the presidency in 2003 to the outgoing incumbent, Václav Klaus.  Zeman, at odds with the current ČSSD leadership, left the party in 2009 to form his own.

While Schwarzenberg peaked at the end of the first round, and certainly entered the second round with a bit of momentum, it wasn’t enough to power a 75-year-old aristocrat with a penchant for napping, into the Czech presidency.

It certainly didn’t help that Schwarzenberg spent three decades outside of the country and his Czech language skills were sometimes seen as less than pristine, and Zeman’s campaign took advantage of the perceived ‘otherness’ of his opponent.

Zeman’s supporters even intimated, despite any evidence, that Schwarzenberg’s family collaborated with Nazis.

World War II featured as an issue in a debate between the two candidates when Schwarzenberg claimed that the Beneš decrees, which dealt with the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II would today be considered a war crime, and Zeman responded by attacking Schwarzenberg as a Sudaten German himself.

Zeman and Schwarzenberg both achieved endorsements from unlikely sources in the second round.

Despite their ideological differences, Zeman long ago won Klaus’s endorsement (Klaus also enabled Zeman’s prime ministerial term in 1998 when he agreed to support the government in exchange for patronage and government positions for the ODS).  Zeman and Klaus belong to the same generation of Czech political leadership, and many see in Zeman a lot of the same qualities as Klaus, who has been outspokenly conservative as president, outspokenly eurosceptic and even cast doubts on the validity of manmade climate change.

Fischer, who could have been expected to endorse Schwarzenberg as a more center-right candidate, failed to do so.  He didn’t endorse Zeman, but he said that he could not vote for Schwarzenberg.

Furthermore, the official ČSSD candidate, Jiří Dienstbier Jr., who finished a surprisingly strong fourth place in the first round, said that he could not vote for Zeman.

Although other ČSSD leaders endorsed Zeman, they were certainly less than enthusiastic in their support.  Although it’s likely that Zeman won the share of ČSSD voters, his win today makes it likely that the next five years will feature an awkward relationship between Zeman’s camp and the formal ČSSD leadership.

The tattooed fifth-place finisher, Vladimír Franz, endorsed Zeman, after attracting worldwide attention in advance of the first round.  Although Franz’s voters likely leaned to the left, they were younger and urban, a constituency to which Schwarzenberg appealed — Zeman’s voter base featured older and more rural voters.

Although Havel, who served as president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1993 and, after the 1993 breakup of the union, the Czech Republic, until 2003, wasn’t as universally popular within the Czech Republic, I wonder if the election would have turned out differently if Havel were still alive to endorse and campaign for his longtime friend Schwarzenberg.  Havel died just 13 months ago in December 2011.

Ultimately, the massive unpopularity of the Nečas government, certainly made a Schwarzenberg victory an uphill challenge, given the double misery of a troubled economy and, like in many European countries these days, pursuing a policy of budget cuts and economic reform.  In the first round, the official ODS candidate, Přemysl Sobotka, a senator, won just 2.46% and placed eighth out of nine candidates.