Image: kerryj.com CC-BY-NC

Many commentators saw the governments of non-party technocrats formed in Greece and Italy in 2011 as an ill omen for development of party-based democracy in Europe. Established parties, it is suggested, are turning to technocratic caretaker administrations as a device to manage economic and political crisis, which allows them both to duck (or least share) responsibility for painful austerity measures. Such non-partisan governments of experts, it is argued, can only widen the yawning the legitimacy gap between governors and governed.

 Technocratically-imposed austerity backed by big established parties can further undermine party democracy by provoking anti-elite electoral backlashes:  the rise of new populist parties or breakthroughs by previously marginal radical groups. This in turn, makes coalition formation difficult and further rounds of caretaker government or awkward left-right co-operation more likely. The success of the Five Star Movement in Italy and its difficult political aftermath, which has finally resulted in an implausible Grand Coalition, seems to illustrate this scenario perfectly. Sometimes, caretaker technocrats themselves even add to the uncertainty, revolting against their erstwhile masters and founding their own new parties.

 How has the drift towards technocratic crisis management impacted Central and Eastern Europe?  The region is sometimes grouped with debt- and crisis-afflicted Southern Europe states as an economically weak periphery of flawed and potentially unstable democracies, where technocratic crisis governments are the order of the day.

Photo European Parliament CC-NC-ND

And not without reason. In March this year the President of Bulgaria Rosen Plevneliev appointed a technocratic caretaker government to lead the country to early elections on 12 May following the resignation of prime minister Boyko Borisov in the face of street protests against poverty, high utility prices and corruption. Hungary had a year-long technocrat-led government in 2009-11, as did the Czech Republic in 2009-10 following the fall the centre-right minority government of Miroslav Topolánek. Meanwhile, Slovenia – one of three CEE states in the Eurozone – is set for a Southern European-style bailout following the downgrading of its bonds to junk status with undoubted domestic ramifications.

 In fact, however, as in Western Europe technocrat-led caretaker governments are something of a rarity in Central and Eastern Europe. Other than the Czech, Bulgarian and Hungarian cases, potential examples are confined to episodes in the immediate post-transition period of the early-mid 1990s. The image of technocrats emerging deus ex machina from ministries and international organisations to relieve a shattered, discredited party establishment is also misleading. While parties in the region are increasingly embattled, technocratic caretaker administrations often seem as much as a tactic to buy time and placate angry electorate and ensure business as usual than a threat to party government per se.

 In some instances this is self-evident. Hungary’s Gordon Bajnai had been a minister in outgoing Socialist-led government and led a semi-political administration, which included Socialist ministers as well as non-party experts and which drew parliamentary supported in parliament only by parties of the liberal left. In other cases the pattern is more subtle. The ‘government of experts’ installed by the Czech Republic’s two main rival parties in 2009 to steer the country down the constitutionally tricky path to early elections seems at first archetypically technocratic: the caretaker prime minister was the previously obscure head of the Czech Statistical Office Jan Fischer and neither he nor any of the civil servants and public managers appointed as ministers were party members.

Photo : Óli Jón CC-BY-ND

Closer examination, however, shows a somewhat different picture. Around a third of Fischer’s cabinet had close ties with the party that nominated them. A few were party members, who simply resigned their party membership on joining the government and resumed it after leaving. Several had stood for national elected office, pursuing on-off political involvement in parallel with careers in public administration. In other cases, links were looser and more informal, but nevertheless real.

 Such partisan ties do not mean that caretaker non-political administrations are mere puppets. Even the grey and seemingly unassertive Fischer sought from the outset to slip the lease of party control imposed on his government. But they do highlight the in some newer European democracies to rethink assumptions about the divide between party politicians and their technocratic replacements.

 In such systems the boundaries between top-level public administration and party structures are fluid and blurred: while formally traditional membership organisations, parties are de facto more loose elite networks, which routinely use partisan appointment to public bodies to enhance their political control and, conversely, seek to bring high-ranking public officials into party organisations chronically lacking well qualified policy specialists.

 In such a context the ideal of non-partisan neutral technocratic government standing above – and against – parties is often more important than the reality. Indeed, it is striking that the national contexts where technocratic caretakers governments have so far emerged (Greece, Italy, Czech Republic, Bulgaria), are precisely those where public administration and the (top level) state apparatus is more subject to party patronage  and predation by informal networks.

 This post draws on a paper to be presented at the EUSA conference in Baltimore 9 – 11 May examining the 2009-10 Fischer government in the Czech Republic.

Photo : Daniel Srb ben Abraham  CC

A few years ago I honestly told myself that I would spend less time academically on Czech right-wing politics and more time on other things. The world really did, after all, need some decent research about Central European interest groups and under-the-radar new parties threatening to break through into Czech politics. Inevitably, things didn’t work out like that.

As the Czech media have noticed rather than sit at home and write his memoirs the former Czech president is embarking on the political equivalent of a European and world tour and – as with 1980s electro pop or – when you’re got all the albums, but didn’t manage to catch the acts live, it’s hard to stay away.

And so it was that I found myself in Pembroke College (Cambridge) listening to Klaus giving the Adam Smith Lecture (transcript including asides faithfully posted by the Václav Klaus Institute here).

In recent years figures on the left, not least fellow Scot Gordon Brown, have tried to reclaim Smith from his totemic status as an icon of the free market right, but – following in the footsteps of previous lecturers Charles Moore and Nigel Lawson – this will be a strictly orthodox interpretation.

 Accordingly, Klaus tells us about the Smithsonian influence over his career, explaining to semi-approved of status of classical pre-Marxian economists in communist Czechoslovakia and his position as a junior researcher attracted to liberal market economics in the 1960s, critical of the market socialist plans of the Prague Spring.

 Adam Smith, the Adam Smith Institute and the politics of Thatcher and Thatcherism were also an inspiration after the fall of communism when he is – he says – promoting the idea of a fully fledged capitalist market economy against residual ideas of a Third Way on the liberal left. Anglo Saxon liberal ideas helped see off the threat of a French – or German inspired social market economy in the Czech Republic.

 This is the classic Klaus back story.  The tale of Third Ways in 1990s is politically spun – and perhaps flattering to British Thatcherites about the real scope of their influences- while as far counter-elites in communist Czechoslovakia as far the 1960s and 1970s are concerned and in need of some careful historical research. (What memoirs and academic research, we have suggests was perhaps more cautious and less ideological then he claims in retrospect).

 Then we move to the real topic of the lecture – and the real topic of almost every Klaus lecture –  the European Union.  The Czech Republic, Klaus realistically concedes, had no way out other than to join the EU. It was after all his government that submitted Czech Republic’s formal application to join the Union (in 1996).

 Adam Smith’s writing had little to say about international economic integration – but in a slightly awkward Justin Bieber turn of phrase Klaus says that thinks Smith

 would support the European economic integration as the final step in the demercantilization of Europe … would be against the massive politicization of life in Europe, against the stifling of free markets and against the concentration of such an enormous power in Brussels.

 A rather striking recognition that there is a free market liberal case for European integration (Hayek and von Mises, I believe came to similar conclusions in 1940s thinking about the post-war reconstruction of the continent), but the question of how you get economic without political integration is characteristically ducked.

 We then leave the Scottish Enlightenment behind and the Adam Smith lecture becomes unabashedly the Vaclav Klaus Lecture. This is, after all, what most people (including me) have come to hear. There are few surprises here. The Maastricht Treaty. Klaus says, is when things went awry, and in hindsight, although still one of his great political heroes, Margaret Thatcher did not oppose it as vigorously as she might have done. (This (and her acceptance of the idea of man-made global warming) was one of the few things about which he was critical of the Iron Lady.

 We finish up tub-thumping euroscepticism – or at least as close as Klaus comes to tub-thumping. Europe needs fundamental change. The EU should certainly not become a transfer union. But how should it be achieved? As always, somewhat vague – it will come about visible and invisible hand not of politics and civil society (obvious not his word) not economic forces, but of a from below initiatives of free citizens challenging the current direction of integration.

….the free discourse of millions of people on the European continent. The change must come from bellow, not from above. It must be a Smithian (or Hayekian) process of spontaneous evolution, not constructism. It must be human action, not human design, to quote another great social scientist, Ludwig von Mises.

 Things become more interesting during the Q and A session.  Like Mrs Thatcher, Klaus conveys the critical quality of believing what he saying and actually wanting to convince his listeners, although unlike Mrs T. Klaus is clearly better talking to people than addressing an audience.  (And we get something of the flavour why Klaus is – or at least was – such an effective and winning politician.

 He is, he says – diplomatically for any Tories in the audience – roughly on the same page politically as David Cameron as regards the European Union or at least committed to the same political direction, but  it would be a tragic mistake to see fiscal union as the only way out of the EU’s cuttent crisis. The experience of Czechoslovakia shows that it is ‘ very easy to split a currency union and it would make sense for the Eurozone to be narrowed. One, two or even three countries (he does not say which) might leave. In the historical example of the Latin Monetary Union of the late 19th and early 20th century highlights the same point, he says.

 He has no regrets about the course of economic transformation in the Czech Republic or any sense the greater regulation would or could have helped. Critical question along these lines is ‘Communist’ in its logic – economic transformation was a pressing political imperative that had to be accomplished rapidly or it would not of been accomplished at all.

 Klaus’s answers and arguments are, as ever, often far from convincing, but, as ever he often has a point. (He is very far from the only villain of the piece in the corrupt and distinctly sub-optimal economic transformation of the Czech Republic and, like other eurosceptics can claim some justification for pointing out fragility and political and sustainability on the Eurozone project has implemented).

 We never do learn, however, quite how he sees eurosceptic movement of the people, which will supposedly bring change from below. He is not, he tells is, planning to lead a European-scale ‘Velvet Revolution’, but whether he is thinking of a continent-wide UKIP-style electoral insurgency, the sullen eurosceptic disengagement of voters or some kind of longer-term cultural change, we never find out.

Photo: David Sedlecký via WikiCommons Media

Yesterday the Czech media was all aquiver with front page news in the left-wing daily Právo – and its associated news server Novinky.cz – that former Czech president Václav Klaus was ‘seriously considering’ running for the European Parliament. And that he was planning to do for the Civic Democrats (ODS) – the party he founded in 1991 and led for many years before stepping down as leader in 2002 then leaving altogether in 2008 in protest at his successor’s embrace of the Lisbon Treaty.

 What’s more, the story runs, as MEP Klaus, given his stature, would more or less automatically lead the European Conservatives and Reformers (ECR) group which brings together the British Tories, ODS, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) in what is intended to be a mainstream conservative anti-federalist bloc.

 The newspaper quotes a ‘credible source’ while Klaus himself has said nothing publicly. But the ex-president is a cautious politician who likes to drop hints, fly kites and generally test the waters. So it’s plausible that someone in his entourage or Klaus himself did indeed  tip the wink. Indeed, he has already hinted directly in an interview in December that he was thinking about running for the EP for his old party, when I was sceptical)

 Could it happen? And could Klaus become a kind of EU-wide Leader of the Eurosceptic Opposition.

Brussels-bound?

 Reception among Civic Democrats of the idea of Klaus returning to lead the party’s Euro-election list in 2014 was mixed, ranging from delighted to downright hostile. Such reaction generally breaks down along predictable lines, although interestingly some erstwhile Klaus supporters like Boris Šťastný were lukewarm.

 The European elections in the Czech Republic coincide with parliamentary elections so Klaus’s re-entry into would immediately make him a player in ODS’s internal politics and Czech domestic politics. The effect could be further fragment a divided party already on historically low poll ratings, which seems to fit to come apart at the seams.

 Many Civic Democrats may remember that Klaus’s eurosceptic themed 2002 parliamentary election campaign to defend ‘national interests’ led to defeat and fear that – despite the inevitable barnstorming return – the result might not be substantially different this time. This might leave a rump ODS transformed into a Klaus vehicle – a party of Klausovci to match President Zeman’s Zemanovci

 It would to impossible to prevent the ex-president rejoining the party and contesting the ‘primaries’ among members to select candidates – as any Czech citizen (with links to the old regime) can. And  he would probably win handsomely. The party leadership would need to approve his candidacy, especially if he headed the party. But it would be very hard to say no. In short, if Klaus wants to go the EP he probably can.

(The small matter of Klaus possibly being tried in the Constitutional Court for treason for allegedly overstepping of constitutional powers  – including delaying signing the Lisbon Treaty – has no bearing on his eligibility even if it did go ahead (uncertain as he is no longer president) and he was found guilty (which I doubt).

More division than unity?

 He would also be the obvious leader of the European Conservatives and Reformers (ECR) – currently led by the Czech MEP and one time Klaus protégé Jan Zahradil. It would be hard to say no to an ex-president with a eurosceptic Thatcherite pedigree like that of Klaus.

 But the arrival of Klaus in the EP might cause more division than unity. The ECR has already been a small and rather troubled grouping, with lots of resentments and rivalries between its three main parties.

 British Conservatives may privately be nervous about ceding control of the ECR to such a high profile Central European politician. Klaus would a much more high-profile, controversial and more difficult to deal with figure than Jan Zahradil.  His views on climate change (he is a sceptic/denier) or civil partnership and gay marriage (he is vehemently opposed) would also tend to reinforce splits between among British Conservatives. While some Tories would obviously lap them up, others would be appalled or fear that, as when the ECR formed, it would be a stick which domestic critics would undoubtedly ruthlessly use to beat them with.

 The ECR has also drawn a clear dividing line between itself and more radical eurosceptics like UKIP and others in the Europe of Freedom and Democracy grouping. But this is in many respects Klaus’s natural constituency. As president he was happy to receive Nigel Farrage at Prague Castle only last year. Anyone who knows Czech politics will know that Klaus’s supporters span a gamut of people ranging from eurosceptic mainstream right through a variety of nationalist and conservative groups (Sovereignty, DOST) to those on the fringes of the far right. Again posing potential difficulties for British Tories.

 Fifty shades of euroscepticism

 The real question is, however, quite how powerful or united a force right-wing  conservative eurosceptics Klaus might lead will be in the EP in 2014. They may not a very large bloc.  Voters who are sceptical or hostile to the EU – or aspects of it like the management of the Eurozone – have a diverse range options to vote for across the spectrum  including parties on the left (the Czech Communsts, Greece’s Syriza etc), extreme right and anti-establishment protest parties like Five Star. Indeed, in some countries like the UK, all major parties are talking eurosceptic – some in the British Labour party, for example, are happy to contemplate Brexit as the EU fragments in core and periphery.

Even on the conservative eurosceptic right, however, euroscepticism has become too diverse to be led by a single figure like Klaus.  In the end, however, the biggest problem for Klaus as a prospective tribune for the forces of conservative euroscepticism is that conservative eurosceptics across  Europe probably actually want different things – the British Conservatives and UKIP are now focused only on the British relationship with the EU  and are less interested in the overall shape of a Union the UK would not (they hope) be fully participating – or participating in all.

 From this point of view, while they might agree with Klaus’s views and cheer him on in the role of provocateur, a Central European politician he is ultimately a bit of an irrelevance to them.

Photo: DerHuti Wikimedia Commons

In many ways a medium-sized Central European country like the Czech Republic could hardly have wished for a better president: an experienced, energetic and erudite politician of international standing able to engage both with the big European issues and handle the domestic problems thrown up by fractious politicians and crumbling coalition governments.

 A president tough-minded enough to periodically remind its citizens that they were living not in an impoverished mafia state, but in a tolerably well-administered, reasonably prosperous, if inevitably flawed, European democracy.

 As president during the last ten years Václav Klaus has been all of these things.

 But he has also been a blisteringly controversial head of state, whose views have often been sharply at odds with most of his fellow politicians or fellow citizens. Provocative and unignorable, Klaus has been loved and (more often) loathed both at home and abroad. He leaves office facing an indictment for treason brought by opponents  for alleged constitutional violations. He is, as Czech political scientist Lubomír Kopeček rightly terms him in a recent biography, a political phenomenon.

 But what lasting impacts does Klaus’s ten year period in office really leave?

 Defined by Europe

If Klaus’s time as ODS leader and prime minister were largely defined by economic transformation, his presidency has been defined by European integration and debates over the Czech  Republic’s place in Europe.

 Klaus had been a critic of the EU since early 1990s and his concern with the nature of Czech statehood dates from the same period.  His move towards a more traditional view of Czech national interests as defined against those of Germany and the German-speaking world also dates from before his presidency – approximately the time of ‘Opposition Agreement’  when Klaus’s ODS worked with Milos Zeman’s 1998-2002 minority Social Democratic government.

 But as president his publically expressed views on European integration radicalised markedly. The EU is no longer just a set of institutions constraining Czech statehood and individual freedom, but is now seen as an almost existential ideological threat. ‘Europe-ism’ becomes most visible part of many headed hydra taking in ‘post-democracy’, concerns over global warning, ‘homosexualism’, ‘humanrights-ism’ and other Klaus bugbears. Integration had no longer merely be corrected and braked, but thrown into reverse to create a Europe of nation states and free markets.

 Such a radicalisation partly reflects the greater political freedom the presidency offers. Surrounded by an entourage of his own choosing, the president was no longer encumbered by the need to compromise with party and coalition colleagues. It also reflected the changing Europe context: Klaus’s presidency coincided with the EU Constitution and its successor the Lisbon Treaty, which proved a powerful focus for him.

The eruption of the Eurozone crisis – where Klaus’s early scepticism about the Euro proved well founded – only served to define Klaus in terms of EU issues.

Political climbdowns

 At the same time, however, Klaus’s euroscepticism remained oddly abstract: we knew what he feared – and most certainly what he opposed – but little about what practical steps he wanted taken.  While other eurosceptics, both in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, championed options ranging from flexible integration to à la carte Europe or full blown withdrawal from the EU, Klaus’s extensive writings and speeches offer no specific programme or strategy for the European questions that preoccupied him.

 Moreover, in practical political terms Klaus’s two presidential terms were a story of defeats and climb downs. His influence in the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) he founded in 1991 waned to the point where the bulk of the party chose pragmatic accommodation with Lisbon. Offered the prospect of single-handedly blocking ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by the ambiguity of the Czech Constitution, he backed down from confrontation with the courts and parliament, signing the treaty he abhorred into law, having gained limited opt- out.  Despite leaving ODS in 2008 and saying that Czech Republic needed a new eurosceptic conservative party, he failed to found  – or even to endorse – one. Instead he was confined a destabilising, off stage presence in the internal politics of ODS, gaining some leverage over the beleaguered ODS-led governments of Miroslav Topolánek and Petr Nečas as their parliamentary majorities dissolved.

 Such reticence partly reflected Klaus’s cautious political temperament. But it also highlights the underlying constraints he faced. The Czech presidency has high prestige, but limited real power. When not beset by infighting, the country’s political parties can easily bypass or over-rule the president. The Civic Democrats and the main opposition Social Democrats effortlessly marginalised Klaus in 2009 to oversee the formation of Jan Fischer’s caretaker government. Even on an issue such as registered partnership for same sex couples where parties were more disunited, Klaus’s adamant opposition counted for little and his presidential veto was straightforwardly over-ridden.

Limited support

 But Klaus’s defeats conceal a deeper truth. The brand of eurosceptic conservative nationalism developed by Klaus in the later part of his political career, while it appeals to some, had ultimately limited support in Czech society. This was true in 2002 when the failure of an election campaign based on ‘national interests’ the EU first led Klaus to seek the presidency. And it was true in 2013, when, poll suggests, most ODS supporters backed Karel Schwarzenberg in the presidential elections despite Klaus’s rejection of him as not properly Czech. Euroscepticism and nationalism, where they appeal to Czech voters at all, appeal to those on the left – often those close to the Czech Republic’s hardline Communist Party.

 Klaus welcomed Miloš Zeman’s victory Karel Schwarzenberg in the presidential election by ironically quoting Václav Havel’s famous words from 1989 about the truth and love overcoming lies and hate. But the greater irony is that – despite vast gulf in political outlook and personality that separated them– Klaus’s presidency revealed many of the same failings and limitations as that of Havel: a head of state preoccupied by a grand political vision trapped by the constitutional weaknesses of his office; the weakness of public and political backing for his ideas; and the limited weight of his country on the international stage.

 This article was first published in Czech by iHned.cz and appears here in an English version with permission.

It can also be read at PressEurop site in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish or Romanian.

Photo: Miloslav Hamřík via Wikimedia Commons

 Ever since Miloš Zeman won the Czech presidential elections on 26 January, analysts have been scrambling to say just what his political views actually are – especially his views on foreign policy and the EU.

 Never quite as prolific a speechifier or writer as Václav Klaus, on stepping down as Prime Minister in 2002, Zeman was semi-retired for the best part of a decade, resurfacing for occasional public appearances.

 His campaign programme and campaign performances offered little in the way of clear and concrete views. Indeed, they tended to highlight that he was inconsistent and liked to make policy on the hoof – saying, for example, he wanted to abolish the Czech Senate one moment, then that he wanted transform it into a Bundesrat-style chamber of the regions.

 Most analysts, including me, therefore settled for the default conclusion that Zeman was basically a kind of a social democrat with a pragmatic pro-European outlook, who was cautious but not hostile towards the EU. Big change – or no change – depending on your point of view.

 But delve a little more deeply and we can find plenty of Zeman views on record: two books of memoirs and various collections of interviews, including most recently Miloš Zeman – Zpověď informovaného optimisty which came out last year as a lead-in to the Zeman presidential campaign.

 In conversation with right-wing journalist Petr Žantovský, who clumsily (and unsuccessfully) tries to lure Zeman into agreeing with various Václav Klaus-like opinions, Zeman sets out his actual views.

 And very interesting views they are too – revealing a number of things that you probably didn’t know about the President elect.

  1.      He is a eurosceptic and a euroenthusiast

 Zeman’s views on the EU have exercised many over the past couple of weeks. Most have confined themselves to noting his quoted media comments that he is a eurofederalist, but opposes a European superstate and characterised him as cautious and pragmatic but pro-European.  This is true as far as it goes, but there are some specifics.

 Firstly, unusually among Czech politicians, who tend to given to broad ideological statements about the EU, Zeman has sharp and specific sense of where the Czech Republic’s interests lie on concrete policy issues, criticising CAP, for example, as irrelevant and disadvantageous for the Czech Republic’s generally large-scale agriculture and noting that Lisbon Treaty had harmed Czech interests downgraded the voting power of small states.

 Secondly, Zeman’s euroenthusiam is real, but is strongly focused on defence and security issues, where he favours further integration including the proverbial (but politically unlikely) ‘European Army’.  This reflects his sense of the weaknesses of small Central European states and concerns over the geopolitical decline of Europe and West and fears of international (Islamic) terrorism. This is a clear contrast with Václav Klaus who wanted no real defence and security integration and, logically, viewed the threat of al-Qaida to the West as over-hyped.

 Thirdly Zeman favours the single currency and the introduction of the euro in the CR and sees it as obvious that shed-loads of EU fiscal governance will be needed to make it work. The long-term advantages of currency stability and an integrated single market still outweigh all the disadvantages as far as he is concerned.

 But as he made clear in remarks in the last few days, he does not want the country to join the fiscal pact and fork out any money before it enters the Eurozone – a position coinciding with that ODS and at odds with that of Karel Schwarzenberg’s TOP09 and the Social Democrats, although in the case of ODS there are probably ideological objections to the euro which Zeman does not share.

 Zeman would like to see Greece out of the Eurozone, partly on the grounds of realism, partly because he thinks the Czech Republic should not bail out levels of Greek public spending it cannot afford itself.

 Fourthly, while obviously not on a Klaus-like crusade to roll back integration, Zeman seems frustrated and sceptical about the social and economic acquis, which he sees as unnecessarily complex and homogenising. Much of it – “…idiocies like energy saving light bulbs…”  - he says could be scrapped and handled at national level, leaving Europe to deal in broad term with a few big questions.

 He has little time for the Lisbon Treaty regarding it as incomprehensible, overcomplicated and over-prescriptive. A short ten page document would be ample, but regrets the dropping of the trappings of statehood included in the original Constitutional Treaty such as a European anthem

 2. He is a fiscal conservative

Photo: ArcCan via WikiMedia Commons

 In his early political career in 1990s – before joining the Czech Social Democrats- Zeman was best known as a liberal who liked to warn of the grim social cost of coming economic reforms. Some of this economic liberalism has clearly stayed with him in the form of a strong commitment to fiscal discipline.

 While a man of the left who favours relatively high public spending, he backs balanced budgets and sound money, lambasts the profligacy of governments from Hungary to Greece to the US and criticizes the last Social Democrat Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Jiří Paroubek as a populist who made extravagant promises on welfare spending.

 Keynesian remedies -  including some of those currently advocated by the Czech Social Democrats – are roundly rejected by Zeman who, as he himself concedes, has essentially monetarist views on the link between inflation and money supply. Indeed, it is inflation he picks out as the underlying danger both for the Czech Republic and Europe. He is especially concerned that anti-crisis measures intended to stimulate or sustain demand may end up stoking inflation.

 Happy to endorse the centre-right government’s demands for  a reduction in EU spending at the recent summit, as president, Zeman seems unlikely to impede the adoption of a constitutional amendment to restrict deficit (the so-called ‘Financial Constitution’) or to worry about the fiscal consequences of eventual Czech membership of the Fiscal Pact.

 3. He is a cultural conservative

Photo: High Contrast via Wikimedia Commons

 Given the tenor of the presidential election campaign – in which Zeman forcefully defended the Beneš Decrees and accused the Austro-Czech Schwarzenberg of talking like Sudeten German – this may come as less of a surprise. But Zeman has a range of culturally conservative views, which go beyond the usual Czech nationalism we are familiar with and (perhaps ironically) put him in some respects close to German Christian Democracy – and, as critics have alleged, far from mainstream European Social Democracy.

 Firstly there are his views on Islam and the Muslim world. His much publicised denunciation of Islam as ‘an anti-civilization stretching from North Africa to Indonesia. … inhabited by two billion people and financed partly from the sale of oil, partly from the sale of drugs’ was not, his conversation with Žantovský suggests, an isolated outburst. ‘Islamic terrorism’, Zeman says in Bush-like fashion is “the greatest threat of the 21^st century and strong, armed forces are the only protection against this threat”.

 Like Václav Havel (and unlike Klaus) Zeman stresses the importance of European identity. In Zeman’s case, however, this is less to do with a concern for unifying civic values than wanting to emphasise that Europe is a distinct ‘civilisation’. Accordingly, Zeman is willing (rather fantastically) to contemplate Russian membership of the EU within 20 years as he sees Russia as culturally/civilizationally deeply European. But Kazakhstan and Turkey do not belong in the Union “because we are talking about a community integrated culturally not just economically”.

 Following on from this, he also thinks EU funding to the Palestinian Authority should be cut off – unlike many on the Czech left he has strongly pro-Israel views – and he appears sceptical about the value of development aid generally, partly as he thinks it props up dictatorships, partly, it seems for, ‘civilizational’ reasons. Zeman is happy to concede he has a Huntingtonian view of the world, but nevertheless goes further than Samuel Huntington on at least one point: in his view “an African civilization (africký civilizační okruh), insofar as we are talking about sub-Saharan Africa, does not yet exist at all.”

 In a European context, almost exactly like Václav Klaus, Zeman is wary of migration seeing the West European experience of multiculturalism as a negative one that that the Czech Republic would do well to avoid, telling his interviewer that:

 “If someone wants to come to this country for economic reasons as a Gastarbeiter then if, and only, if, there’s a domestic labour shortage, let them come. Let them assimilate. And if they can’t, then let them go. A classic example are the Muslim ghettos in Western Europe, where the capacity to assimilate is practically nil.”

 Sexual and gender politics do not crop up much in the conservation, although Zeman’s  views and attitudes here are well known: he is hostile to feminism; he also dismissed EU proposals for gender quotas in the boardroom out of hand during the campaign (as did Karel Schwarzenberg) and had no inhibitions about describing his one time opponent in the Social Democratic Party, the former Education Minister, Petra Buzková in his memoirs as a ‘bitch’ (coura).

 Zeman does, however, have some mildly liberal views on some social issues batting aside an invitation from his interviewer to criticise the Czech LGBT community’s Prague Pride parade – and local polticians’ support for the event – with an obvious lack of concern or interest. 

 Although well educated and widely read, Zeman is also happy to own up to  conservative cultural tastes – he likes Abba and mainstream classical music.

 4. He favours production over consumption

Zeman’s remarks are shot through with an almost obsessive concern that public spending – which he sees an important and necessary for economic development – should be channelled into infrastructure spending: “My basic recipe” he tells Žantovský “is to lower spending on consumption and raise expenditure on investment”. This seems to be seen mainly in terms of physical infrastructure: roads, railways, public buildings etc, rather than, say education, research and development or the knowledge economy. He is also excoriating about environmentalists (‘Green fanatics’) whose concerns over development projects and industrial development he has no time for.

 These are very much the views of a sizeable, traditionalist wing of the Czech Social Democratic Party (especially at local level) whose points of reference for economic development are in rooted 1960s and 70s and whose professional careers are often linked with bigger (former) state enterprises depend on state contracts, which are still big players in the Czech economy. It is perhaps not entirely surprising that some of the bigger donations to Zeman’s campaign came from construction firms.

 Coupled with this, however, the incoming President clearly has a strong cultural aversion, to consumption and consumerism and a preference for austere, basic lifestyle of less well off provincial Czechia, where he chose to live during his ten years of political retirement. Sounding almost like Václav Havel, he speaks of “… a monumental value system… [of] hedonism, consumerism…” and laments the fact that people are increasingly spending their time buying things in hypermarkets and shopping malls as their main leisure activity.

 As this 2007 documentary (at times slightly embarrassingly) shows, with his small house, cheap shorts,  t-shirt and trips to the local supermarket – Zeman himself seems absolutely the real deal as far as a life of small town ordinariness and lack of interest in material possessions are concerned. A hairshirt attitude that, ironically, seems to have more in common with the despised Greens  than the big money liefstyle of those running powerful economic groups he favours politically.

 This is very much the case with Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions which rode the wave of the Newsnight economics correspondent’s single brilliant blog post, arguing that the Arab Spring was just the most powerful manifestation of new and epoch-making wave of global protest.

 The (recently re-issued) book doesn’t in truth add a great deal to the ideas sketched in the blog post:  there is some decent reportage from hot spots of protests round the world Athens, New York, London – with Mason’s writing about the slums of Cairo and Manila particularly insightful – but in the end this is just high quality padding.

As in the original blog, the reasons Why It’s Kicking Off are essentially straightforward and threefold:  the strains imposed by global economic contraction; the new possibilities for decentralised, horizontal organisation opened up in by the internet and social media; and the role of ‘graduates without a future’ who feel the full brunt of the new insecurity but are also digital natives who ‘tweet in their dreams’.

But there is a slightly deeper underlying argument running through the book. Mason’s original post, as he is happy to relate, sent to have come from a conversation in the pub with activists at the Really Free School (then) at squatted premises in Bloomsbury. He was, as he appears less happy to confirm, a former member of the Trotskyist Workers Power group at some point. He certainly clearly comfortable and knowledgeable with the politics of the far left – both historically and now – in a way that few mainstream journalists are unless they have been on the inside of such movements. (The BBC’s Andrew Marr -  once a member of  the Workers’ Liberty groupuscule – is another example).

Paris Barricades June 1848

Read carefully Why It’s Kicking Off  has a clear left libertarian anarchist slant in its interpretation of politics and history:  the logic of all major political struggles is one opposing the forces of authoritarianism, hierarchy and centralisation and to demands for individual autonomy and self-determination. Although the grimy struggle for resources and the hard lives of working people are important, the class politics that dominated the 20^th century are ultimately something of detour.

 In the early 21^st century, the book tells us, we are in a sense, back with a social, economic and political landscape that resembles 1848 or 1871 (or occasionally 1914) more than 1945 or 1989: a weak labour movement; an ideologically disoriented left with no grand narrative –  loosely social populist ; a  mass of casualised and/or welfare-dependent urban poor; a globalised economy linking up seemingly disparate crises of different regimes and regions; and  pulsating breakthroughs in communications technology.

 While clearly sympathetic to the movements he covers, Mason shies away from  offering any programme or partisan perspective, slipping back into the role of journalistic observer. But he does offer a warning. What is at stake in the multiple ‘global revolutions’ he argues, is the potential unwinding of economic – but perhaps also political and cultural – globalisation  and a retreat into inward looking trade and political bloc with nasty, but unspecified, political consequences. The logic is very much that dilemma between isolated, inward looking fundamentalisms of all kinds and bland, souless turbo-capitalism posed in Benjamin R. Barber’s classic 1992 essay (and book – were no blog posts in those days) Jihad Versus McWorld.

Anarcho-syndicalism lite

The book’s clever readable anarcho-syndicalism lite is in many ways its most interesting and though-provoking element. But in other ways, even as a journalistic essay, it is a damp squib which sees the fizz of Mason’s brilliant blog post burn away to nothing very much at all.

The book’s view of the Internet and social media as straightforwardly empowering horizontal networks of citizens against those in power comes across a plausible only for a moment – and then seems naive. True as far as it goes certainly. The role of the net in facilitating social control and demobilising citizens into info-tainment and consumerism has been ably, if long windedly, explored by Evgeny Morozov. in The Net Delusion Kicking Off offers us only  doe-eyed techno-determinism.

 It fails to make much of a case for that the protests are deeply interconnected – except in the rather superficial sense that in a globalised world everything is always connected with everything in some way -  and that political activists are, of course, always generous in their expressions of affinity and solidarity with whoever else seems to be up against it and ‘in struggle’ anywhere else in the world. Tahir Square might indeed have been a ‘meme’ take up on the placards and posters of unionists in Wisconsin or student protesters in London (and why not?), some of whom even showed up in Cairo. As BBC4′s Storyville showed last week, Hackers from Anonymous spontaneously set out to help Egyptian bypass the Mubarak regime’s shut-down of the internet.

 I finished the book while listening to the excellent BBC Analysis programme on the Alouite sect in Syria, which made it clear that – while Twitter and identikit ‘graduates with a future’ might indeed have helped kick things off (partly though the demonstration effect of events in Egypt, Libya) – the grim and violence struggle for the country’s future was being determined by deep-rooted history, culture, geo-political and religion. In hindsight comparison of the storm-in-a-teacup anti-tuition fees/anti-austerity student protests in the UK with the momentous events in the Arab world are frankly rather embarrassing – and perhaps reveal an odd blind spot in the book’s analysis: it makes no distinction between regimes which, whatever their flaws, are liberal democratic as far as shifting governments and basic human rights are concerned, those which, despite pseudo-democratic trappings, were Mubarak’s Egypt or Ahmadinejad’s Iran patently authoritarian.

Obsolete horizontalism?

 The book’s ideas about graduates as a key social group clobbered by the onset of recession – and thus the trigger (potentially) for social unrest; the waning of traditional ideology and political organisation and the upsurge of a desire for horizontal, informal organisation and self realisation; the emergence of the underclass as a rough and ready social force for change are also less than new.

 While the book abounds with cool anachronistic comparisons with 1848, it rather oddly over-looks (and dismisses) the more obvious and recent parallel with ideas of the (post-) 1968 new left and New Social Movements of 1970s. Paul Mason tells us that in the UK graduates without secure or well paid jobs to go to are merging with disaffected inner city youth in a new undercurrent of protest and dissent. He may be right. But delve into some old paperbacks and you see the same points made by academic gurus of the New Left like Robin Blackburn and student leaders of the 1968 evenements like Daniel Cohn-Bendit (now an MEP for the German Greens worried about the future of the EU). Observing British anti-tutiton fee protests Paul Mason  is enthused by a ‘Dubstep Rebellion’ in which

‘… a good half the marchers are undergraduates.. [but]…. the key phenomenon, politically is the presence of the youth: banlieue-style youth,   from places like Croyden and Peckham  or the council estates of Camden, Islington  and Hackney. [There are]  … small groups of young men dressed in the hip-hop fashions of working class estates…’

More esoterically he quotes the Nomadic Hive Manifesto put together (also in Camden) by activist opposing local arts provisions, which – not implausibly in my opinion – sees undercurrents of social discontent bubbling below the surface of everyday life:

“If you listen care­fully, all that moan­ing, the sound that can be heard just behind the drone of every­day life, cars and the slurp­ing of lattes, has become a little more urgent: a hum­ming of dis­sat­is­fac­tion becomes dis­sent.”

Writing some forty year earlier in the wake of the May evenements Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was there already.  In Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (Penguin, 1969) -which draws on some of the same left libertarian thinkers that Paul Mason clearly knows- Cohn-Bendit, then known as Danny Le Rouge wrote:

“What we need is not organisation with a capital O, but a host of insurrectional cells – be they ideological groups, study groups – we can even use street gangs. (…) .”

“… put on your coat and make for the nearest cinema. Look at their deadly love-making on the screen. Isn’t it better in real life? (…) Then during the interval when the first advertisement comes on, pick up your tomatos…and chuck them. Then get out in the street … and discover the message of the days of May and June. Stay awhile in the street and remind yourself the last word has not been said.”

Sous le pavé la plage. In fairness Mason does, make a few, rather out of the way points about the legacy of 1968: that the idea, for example, of politics as performance, show and entertainment fed to us through the media – have bled, almost unnoticed into mainstream culture. We are all situationalists now and these days even Michael Gove quotes Gramsci.

Activists of the Occupy generation are, Mason observes, much less explicity – or to put it more brutally, much less coherently – ideological than soixante-huitards like the young Cohn-Bendit. Obsolete Communism - a mass market paperback remember – contains a fairly hefty theoretical critique of Marxism and a stiff does of anarchist political theory. In the rhetoric of the ‘new global revolutions’ in the rich West while there are references to The System, Neoliberalism etc, we have something  tricksier, more stylish but in the end very empty. The knowing, post-modern ironic tones of the Hive Manifesto (‘On Beeing and Nothingness’ – ho ho) -  whose style and subtance almost a pastiche of the kind of appeal Cohn-Bendit and others were penning four decades ago- seems calculating more to make you want to slurp another latté than throw a tomato.

Paul Mason’s  response (again rather brief and buried) is that Twitter and Facebook  have changed everything, making the situationalist, soixante-huitard vision of decentralised, fluidrebellion materialising from nothing at last a reality. An arguable point. Perhaps Peppe Grillo is indeed today’s Danny Le Rouge. But the huge social mobilisations of the past didn’t need Blackberrys – indeed perhap they were huge because they didn’t have them. Nor is it clear how the new counter-culture would resist the co-optation and commercialisation that – as Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argued in  The Rebel Sell – blunted and subverted earlier movements. The internet and  social media -  which lend themselves as much to viral marketing and technocratic projects of social control as kicking off protest -  look in many way as flimsy are the abandoned barricades of 1848 recorded in the classic early piece of photo journalism above.

Photo: Juandev via Wikimedia Commons

The first direct elections of the Czech president offered a refreshing contrast to the back room manoeuvring and political horse-trading that accompanied the election in parliament of presidents Havel and (especially) Klaus. Despite the nastiness of the Zeman campaign and vacuousness of the political marketing around Karel Schwarzenberg, voters were offered a clear choice between personalities and priorities and turned out in large numbers to make it.

 Television pictures of voters ranging from ski-suited holiday-makers to prisoners choosing the new head of state send quiet but clear message of a country that takes its democracy seriously and knows how to use it.

 But the elections also hold up a more subtle mirror to Czech democracy, showing a political system still defined by patterns laid down in 1990s, which may nevertheless be on the cusp of change.

 Some of the lessons of the presidential elections are familiar ones.

 First, they confirm that Czech politics is largely a contest between left and right – and that left and right in the Czech context can be largely reduced to conflicts over economic distribution: ‘Who Gets What, When and How’ to borrow to the phrase of the American political scientist H.D Laswell.

 Miloš Zeman built his political career during 1990s – and made the then marginal Social Democrats (ČSSD) a serious political force – by understanding this.  He has now rebuilt that career by sticking the same basic insight. The Zeman campaign was no masterpiece of political communication, but it cut with the grain of how most Czech voters see things, especially those squeezed in economically hard times.

 Ducking or denying the left-right divide may work for a newly launched party hoping to win over a limited chunk of the electorate like TOP09 when it first contested elections in 2010. It is a much less sure-fire strategy for winning a presidential contest where broad swathe of voters need to be mobilised.

 Second, they confirm that a party or bloc that cannot reach beyond Prague and major urban centres will lose. The Czech Republic is a country of small and medium sized towns, not big metropolises. This was well understood by Václav Klaus in 1990s when he founded the Civic Democrats (ODS) as a party with a strong regional base and later by Zeman when he toured the provinces as leader of ČSSD in his Zemák battlebus. Like other before him, Schwarzenberg undermined by his inability to win support in breadth as well as in depth.

 Third, the elections show that although Czech voters are strongly averse to parties and party politicians, they are in the end reluctant to do without them. The success of Schwarzenberg and (ultimately) Zeman suggested voters wanted seasoned politicians at arm’s length from the party-political establishment, not anti-politicians. Tellingly, both the technocratic, former caretaker prime minister Jan Fischer and multi-tattooed “citizens’ candidate” Vladimir Franz polled far below expectations.  We may also ask whether Karel Schwarzenberg was, in the end, best served by the clever and inventive marketing that turned him from an elder statesman to a pop art icon with no discernable political message.

 Fourth, the elections tell us that questions of national identity still matter in Czech politics. In hindsight the distinct background of Karel Schwarzenberg was always going to leave him vulnerable to attack. The appearance in the campaign of the Beneš Decrees – the emotive issue of postwar ‘transfer’ of Czechoslovakia’s ethnic German population in 1945-6 – and the brutal questioning of the aristocratic Schwarzenberg’s Czechness by opponents were as predictable as they were ugly.

 The underlying questions raised– What does it mean to be Czech? Who is and is not Czech? Should citizens be represented by those socially and culturally like them? – are well established and legitimate. What is striking for any external observer, however, is the very limited range of very traditional ideas about Czech identity and history that politicians feel they can acceptably give in response.

At the same time, there is so far little sign that such old-style nationalist politics– národovectví as it is often termed in Czech – are set to reshape the political scene. That around tenth of ODS supporters appear to have heeded Václav Klaus’s advice to vote for the socialist Zeman rather than the conservative Schwarzenberg because the latter is too foreign is, in its own way, extraordinary, but is essentially a political footnote.

But the elections also highlight undercurrents of change.

The marginalization of established parties – and the rapidity with which they have acquiesced to it – is extraordinary.  Candidates of small extra-parliamentary parties do not normally win national elections with such ease.  Few prospective governing parties would greet the fourth place finish of their candidate as a success as ČSSD did.  The debacle suffered by ODS candidate Přemysl Sobotka, who polled 2.46%, hardly needs comment.

Parties have no doubt calculated that the personality-centred nature of the presidential contest will give way to politics as usual at the next parliamentary elections. However, they may find that having acquired a taste for a new and different set of contenders, voters may again look beyond the mainstream.

The presidential elections may bring change in the way politics is organised. The looser knit campaign structures of presidential candidates have arguably been just as effective at fighting elections as conventional party organisation. They have also been a laboratory for political campaigning. Miloš Zeman’s correctly calculated that to reach his voters TV performances matter than any amount of web presence. But even the traditional political operators of the Zeman campaign, know that this may not hold true in future.

 The successes and limitations of the Schwarzenberg campaign’s use of social media will be carefully studied, as will the wholly unexpected grassroots initiative to nominate Vladimír Franz.  As both campaigns quickly realised, a political movement that can come up with successful recipe to co-ordinate web-based campaigning with more traditional political activity on the ground will be a powerful force.

When President Zeman takes office on 8 March he will therefore preside over a political system which, like him, is still very recognisably a product of post-communist democracy that formed in 1990s.

 When he steps down in five or ten years’ time, however, the political landscape may look appreciably different.

This article was first published in Czech in Hospodářské noviny on 30 January 2013 and appears here in English with permission.

Image: http://www.volimakarla.cz

Few observers, even a matter of weeks beforehand, would have predicted the success of the two candidates who will be contesting the second round run-off to choose the Czech Republic’s first directly elected president, which takes place on 25-26 January.

 Miloš Zeman, who topped the poll in the first round on 11-12 January with 24.2 per cent, is a former Prime Minister who led the Czech Social Democratic Party between 1993 and 2001. However, he acrimoniously split with the party he once led and his return from political retirement in 2009 to lead his own Citizens’ Right Party (SPOZ) was regarded by many as a vanity project. SPOZ failed to enter parliament in the May 2010 parliamentary elections and Zeman’s presidential bid, announced in June last year, seemed set to be similarly unsuccessful.

 Karel Schwarzenberg, the aristocratic Czech foreign minister, who ran Zeman a close second with 23.4 per cent of the vote, was perhaps always a more plausible contender. A scion of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, diplomat and former chief of staff to Václav Havel, Schwarzenberg was one of the Czech Republic’s most popular politicians.  The electoral success in 2010 of TOP09, the newly formed party he led, owed much to Schwarzenberg’s appeal as retro anti-politician. However, although one of the first to announce his candidacy, Schwarzenberg‘s campaign soon flagged badly, damaged by TOP09’s role in the governing centre-right coalition and unwavering commitment to austerity. At 75, Schwarzenberg was the oldest candidate and had not always appeared in robust good health. By December 2012 polls still put his support at under 10 per cent and – while I’d always fancied Zeman (politically I mean) most commentators including me had written Schwarzenberg’s challenge off. Indeed, I thought those who even mentioned him as outsider possibility were well off the mark.

 The front runner falters

Jan Fischer Photo: David Sedlecký via Wikimedia Commons

 The clear front-runner for much of the campaign was the independent candidate Jan Fischer. Fischer, a career statistician and Vice President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, had been the highly popular prime minister of a technocratic caretaker government in 2009-10. His well organised campaign, backed by a number of business interests, stressed his credentials as a non-ideological reformer with no ties to the political establishment. He also benefitted from the inability of the two largest Czech parties, the centre-right Civic Democrats (ODS) and Social Democrats (ČSSD), to put forward credible heavyweight candidates. Many Czech voters were also clearly jaded by the two parties’ longer-term failure to shake off the influence of corrupt business lobbies, resulting in repeated scandals.

 Despite the vagueness of his rhetoric, it quickly became apparent that Fischer appealed largely to voters on the centre-right. The resulting vacuum on the left was filled by Miloš Zeman. Zeman’s small party of veteran ex-Social Democrats proved surprisingly adept at organising and fundraising and – helped by the decision of the Communist Party not to run its own candidate – his campaign gradually gained momentum. By mid-December, polls indicated that Zeman had moved ahead of Fischer, whose lacklustre media performances and increasingly directionless campaign offered little serious competition. Fischer was, however, an uncomfortable standard-bearer for the right and soon faced growing criticism for having joined the Communist Party during the 1980s to smooth his career path, which his detractors felt showed a lack of integrity.

 I though Fischer would hang to second place – indeed given a professional interest in technocrat politicians, dull though he was, I rather hoped we would. A last minute drive by the Schwarzenberg campaign (and civic groups linked to it) mixing anti-communism with the viral marketing of Schwarzenberg as a ‘personality’ and political celebrity, seems finally to have tipped the balance in of their man. The final sets of polls released early in the New Year showed a surge of support for his candidacy as he emerged as a rallying point for  liberal and centre-right voters  – a trend clearly carried over into first-round voting.

 Jan Fischer, by contrast, received markedly less than the 20-25 per cent of the vote forecast in the polls. With 16.5 per cent of votes he came only fractionally ahead of the relatively inexperienced and unknown Social Democrat candidate Jiří Dienstbier Jr – the son of the late Czech dissident of the same name – whose energetic campaign impressed many. The election was, however, an unmitigated disaster for other main Czech party, the Civic Democrats (ODS), whose candidate polled a mere 2.5 per cent and finished eighth in a field of nine. The composer and academic Vladimír Franz, whose blue tattooed face and inventive shoestring campaign drew considerable international media attention, polled 6.8 per cent.

First round results by district winner – blue KS, red MZ Image: Fext via WikiMedia Commons

 A sharp social split

 The second round is likely to be a close contest. Miloš Zeman will seek to make it a run-off between left and right, stressing Schwarzenberg’s role in government and right-wing views on economic issues. This may be an effective strategy. First round voting patterns suggest a sharp social split between prosperous urban centres, which heavily backed Schwarzenberg – who polled as much as 43 per cent in Prague – and poorer regions and smaller towns where voters put Zeman ahead. Schwarzenberg, by contrast, will try to broaden his appeal to the political centre, projecting himself as a non-partisan independent who has worked in many parties in his long career. Schwarzenberg’s team will also aim to once again sell their candidate as a personality, making use of social and new media strategies, which were a hallmark of their successful last minute mobilisation in the first-round.

 Whoever wins, some political consequences are already clear. The Czech President has weak constitutional powers, but plays an important role in foreign policy and government formation. Outgoing president Václav Klaus was a stanch Eurosceptic, who obstructed the Lisbon Treaty and believed European integration should be thrown into reverse. Schwarzenberg and Zeman are both Europhile: Schwarzenberg is strongly committed to Czech participation in a more integrated core EU, while Zeman is a cautious Euro-federalist. Moreover, Presidents Václav Havel and Václav Klaus refused to contemplate any government dependent on the support of the hardline Communist Party. Both second round candidates would be willing to do so, opening the way for likely Communist-Social Democrat co-operation in government after the next parliamentary elections in 2014.

This post was originally posted on the LSE EUROPP blog and is reproduced under the terms of a Creative Commons Licence

Photo: http://www.prezydent.pl via WikiMedia

 The political return of former Social Democrat leader and leading presidential hopeful Miloš Zeman has been one of the more surprising emerging-from-under-the -radar phenomena in Czech politics over the past couple of years.

 For most observers of Czech politics Zeman was something of a historical figure, linked with the early years of transiton and the political battles of 1990s. Having shifted the Czech Social Democrats from a minor party to one of the big players in early-mid 1990s by making them a robust party of opposition, Zeman won a notable election victory in 1998, did a deal with his erstwhile nemesis Vaclav Klaus to form a minority government and served one term as Prime Minister (1998-2002) and then retired to his cottage in the Vysočina highlands.

Retirement seems not to have suited him and still nursing political ambitions – and much to the horror of many former colleagues – he won a ‘primary’ among Social Democrat supporters to be the party’s presidential candidate in the 2003. Alas as the Czech head of state was still indirectly elected by MPs and senators at the time, enough Social Democrat parliamentarians failed to vote for him that he was humiliatingly eliminated from this contest early on (Vaclav Klaus was finally elected and then re-elected for a second term in 2008).

Zeman then finally parted company with his former party, wrote some splenetic, best-selling memoirs attacking ex-colleagues – memorably described by one academic reviewer as a ‘foul fart of a book’ – and it seemed that that was the last we would hear of him. The cigarette-smoking, beer- and becherovka drinking Zeman, known for his ponderous quotes, not very funny bonmoty and bruisingly effective political personality was set to become just another memory of 1990s.

But come 2013, if the latest and last polls are to be believed, Zeman is the front runner in the Czech Republic’s first direct presidential elections, edging ahead of one-time favourite Jan Fischer, the former prime minister in the 2009-10 technocratic caretaker government. As Klaus steps down, Zeman steps up. We seem set for Fischer-Zeman second round run-off on 25-26 January. And even if Zeman unites a huge swathe of right-wing voters behind Fischer, given the left-leaning inclination of the Czech electorate he must surely be in with a shouting chance of taking over at Prague Castle on 7 March.

How has this happened when so many other would-be comebacks and political vanity projects fail? Just think of the stillborn LEV21 party of Zeman’s one time rival and fellow semi-detached ex-Social Democrat Jiří Paroubek.

Several factors seem to have combined in Zeman’s favour:

1. He is well known

For many voters. as well as being a known quantity. Zeman’s big political personality and experience as Prime Minister makes him a reasonably credible figure for high office. His flaws – the embarrassing off the cuff remarks, off jokes and occasional lack of political energy – are also well known and may therefore be discounted in advance by voters.

Notwithstanding the Opposition Agreement deal with Klaus, from a left-wing point of the point of view Zeman’s time in front-line politics can be seen reasonably  successful. Zeman also left office at a time of his own choosing, rather than because of crisis, scandal or electoral defeat. Almost the only Czech prime minister to do so (caretakers excepted).

2.He is a reasonably plausible outsider

At the same time, having been out of national politics for the best part of a decade and broken his links with the Social Democrats, Zeman can credibly position himself as something of anti-establishment outsider.

His presidential run comes at a time when Czechs are generally disillusioned with established parties and when the Social Democrats could no find no experienced, high profile politician to stand for head of state (or at least none who were acceptable across the party and willing to run – former EU Commissioner Vladimír Špidla might have been an option). (Indeed, the Social Democrats seem rather short of big charismatic leaders generally just now. The current party leader Bohumil Sobotka is articulate and intelligent, but as someone acidly commented at a recent conference I went to comes across more as a spokesman than a leader.)

Lukewarm semi-endorsement by old rival Václav Klaus might even pull in a few voters from the right – although like Klaus such ‘naughty right-wingers’ will probably be expressing their dislike for the various centre-right and centrists candidates more than wanting to propel Zeman to office.

3. His support is well organised and well financed

Although there are questions over where Zeman’s political money comes from, with widely reported links to the Russian oil company Lukoil (denied by Zeman) and other Russian donors (not denied). Whatever the truth, the Zeman campaign has sufficient resources and organisation to be effective – and it started organising early. The Citizen’s Rights Party – Zemanites (of which Zeman is oddly only the honorary leader) was formed in October 2009 and contested the May 2010 parliamentary elections, pulling in a not negligible 4.33% – seemingly all at the expense of the Social Democrats – which was almost enough to cross the 5% threshold to enter parliament.  SPOZ’s origins, in fact, go back some years earlier to the curiously named, Friends of Miloš Zeman association, run by Zeman’s former right-hand man and the ex-communist apparatchik Miroslav Šlouf.

Despite clearly having cash to splash, SPOZ – as its reasonably solid performance in the October 2012 regional elections showed – also has organisation on the ground.  The collection of 50,000 signature petition to nominate Zeman was also a notably quick and efficient operation. Šlouf and various other ex-Social Democrats in SPOZ are not political amateurs.

4. He has potentially broad appeal

While disliked and dismissed on the right, Zeman is acceptable to a range of left-wing voters, including Communist voters who might be put off by a candidate with closer links to the Social Democrats or with associations to Havel or the dissident movement.  The Social Democrats official candidate Jirí Dienstbier jr. – son of the late dissident of the same name – has fought a shrewd campaign positioning himself a moderate, modern politician and actively solicited the support of the Communist Party (KSČM – which for once is not running its own candidate). Despite, this Dienstbier is off the pace and you wonder how many Communist voters might hold his family background against him.

Zeman is less difficult for the party and   has rather cleverly tacked towards some KSČM positions, for example his critical sounding remarks about the EU – he is he says a Euro federalist but against an EU superstate (work that one out) – and demands for additional funding if he flies the EU flag at Prague Castle.

5. He has been underestimated

Finally, that most telling of political assets: Zeman has been underestimated by opponents. Despite the low key but obvious momentum he has had since 2010.  He has been viewed a something of a political has-been or a buffoon. Somehow despite everything, for many it is hard to believe that he could really actually win.

Despite a slow build up media scrutiny about funding and Lukoil connections – Zeman has faced little scrunitny or critical opposition in the campaign. Certainly few questions have been as to one what kind of a president he would be. Until the recent efforts of civic initiatives to boost the campaign of Foreign Minister and TOP09 leader Karel Schwarzenberg, the main political parties (ODS, CSSD, TOP09) seem have written off their chances of their candidates and to be saving their real time, energy and money for parliamentary elections.

What kind of President would Zeman be?

His website offers only a selection of bland, somewhat fence-sitting views. His statements suggest he is still broadly on the mainstream pro-European centre-left and would be considerably less toxic to many abroad than Klaus. He was even one of only three presidential candidates to accept an invitation to a debate organised by Prague Gay Pride (two refused). On the other hand his denouncing of Islam as an ‘anti-civilization’ could have come straight from Geert Wilders.

 Perhaps we will have to wait for 7 March to find out…

Photo: DerHuti via WikiMedia Commons

What will Václav Klaus do next? This has been a pertinent question in Czech politics pretty much any time over the last twenty years and, of course, no more so than now: VK steps down from his second and final term as President of the Czech Republic on 7 March with nowhere very obvious to go  politically. Klaus himself has been typically sphinx-like about his future plans, telling the Prague news magazine Euro shortly before Christmas that following the end of his presidential term he could

see no reason to signal any immediate political ambitions, but I don’t think it’s the end of the road (nemyslím, že je všem dnům konec) so we’ll se what happens. But I don’t think I’ll be announcing a return to Czech politics tomorrow. I don’t think that’s realistic. But I wouldn’t rule out some kind of attempt to go into European politics (pokus o politiku evropskou).

As the interview was ending he also lobbed in the (not very plausible sounding) revelation that in 2002 – in the wake of a bad defeat in national parliamentary elections which had seen his Civic Democrat party (ODS) finally stir into life and contemplate throwing him out – he had considered running for the European Parliament. They would, he explained, happily have given him the top spot on the party list to get him out of the way. And – if you believe the rest of this rather unlikely sounding story -  no doubt they would.

It’s a still harder scenario to imagine for 2014.  While Klaus still has his fans in ODS – and  didn’t miss the opportunity in this interview to stir the party’s factional politics by praising Prime Minister Nečas’s presumed Number One Challenger, Industry Minister Martin Kuba- his active re-entry into ODS politics is hard to imagine. And still harder to imagine is that it would lead him straight to Brussels and Strasbourg to the heart of a small-ish ODS Euro-faction and – if it still exists – the small and still rather troubled European Conservatives and Reformers (ECR) group.

It is after all hard  to stand for election EU institutions if you have deep-seated ideological objections European political structures and  think they are sucking the life out of politics, which can only be reconstituted at national level. Still some Eurosceptics do manage this. So what might a Klausian pokus o politiku evropskou look like?

In the inevitable reference his latest foreign speech, Klaus approving mentions meeting maverick anti-Euro, central banker-turned-pcritic of immigation and multi-culturalism Thilo Sarrazin, who reportedly shook Klaus warmly by the hand and congratulated him warmly for being real radical. Could we imagine the emergence some kind of  trans-European alliance of euro-sceptic personalities with Klaus and Sarraz and various local equivalent from across member states? A more high profile version of Declan Ganley’s stillborn Libertas venture of 2009, perhaps artfully fudging whether it was a party or movement,  and coming onto the European political stage in much more  deeply crisis-hit times.

While it would undoubtedly match Klaus’s sense of personal and political grandeur, such are the complexities of pan-European political organisation is unlikely to come about. And, if it did, as with Libertas in 2009, Klaus would be unlikely to be in the vanguard.

The logic is exactly the same as that explaining Klaus’s retreat from Czech politics. Despite the endless speculation and hints from Klaus himself that he would launch or back a new eurosceptic conservative-nationalist political party – and the fact that admirers and ideological confreres created numerous political vehicles that might have served as the basis for such a grouping (the Free Citizens Party, Libertas.cz, the DOST initiative, even Jana Bobošíkova’s Sovereignty movement) it never come about.

This perhaps reflected shrewd assessment on the part of Václav Klaus that as leader or patron of such a movement he would garner enough support to be more that a bit player in Czech politics, presaging a slow drift into the role of has-been elder statemans of the kind experienced by Vladimír Mečiar in Slovakia.

The same logic suggests that Klaus should stay clear of risky, potentially humiliating ventures European politics and stick to the safer confines of the soon to be established Václav Klaus Institute. Notwithstanding Klaus’s (actually rather well formulated and perceptive warnings a growing wave of angry anti-political nostrums a ‘chaotic mix of everything possible) he does, on balance, seem set as the idiosyncratic commentators at Prague’s Fleet Sheet predict  ‘for the nether world of NGOism and will undermine Czech and European politics from outside the system of political parties’.

My own hunch is that, while Klaus’s Institute is likely to be as active as he promises, we might perhaps see an Olympian DeGaulle-like retreat into conspicuous obscurity on the part of the man himself, as VK waits for his moment of destiny.

And you sense from the interview that he thinks that such opportunities may come. Europe he tells his interviewer cannot go on becoming more and more indebted: ‘at some point there be an irreversible crash to which, if change does not come, is certainly heading’ (… to jednou musí narazit na neodvratný krach, k němuž to, pokud nenastane změna, jednoznačně směřuje.) before quickly reassuring us that he does not in fact  actually want  such a crash.

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