A divided house
One question hanging over the election was whether it would result in the largest number of political parties in the Chamber of Deputies since the 1990s. And that is almost what happened. Several obscure coalitions were successful, and the new lower house will thus be composed of a heterogeneous group of people, many of whom represent only a very small segment of society’s opinions.
According to Tomas Jungwirth Brezovsky, head of the Climate Team at the Association for International Affairs (AMO), the composition of the new chamber will be a crucial test for Czech climate policy.
“With the Motorists in parliament, we can expect louder attacks on climate science and an extremely ideological debate on decarbonisation,” warns Jungwirth Brezovsky. “The Motorists are openly expressing their interest in [leading] the Ministry of the Environment so that they can effectively destroy it. In the long term, this would harm not only nature and climate protection, but also hundreds of thousands of people who rely on subsidy programs for insulation or heat source replacement.”
“The Green Deal has become a lightning rod for dissatisfaction with price increases and regulation,” Jungwirth Brezovsky sums up. “The green transformation is about big money and big power. Instead of looking for fair solutions, Czechia is questioning the very meaning of the whole change.”
With the failure of Stacilo!, the former communists, to win enough votes to get into parliament, it is notable that the Chamber of Deputies will once again lack a true left wing, which cannot fail to have consequences for the already severely tested social harmony.
“Andrej Babis himself would at least push for some social measures, but he will probably be caught in the grip of the market-fundamentalist Motorists,” warns Smejkalova of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
According to Smejkalova, there is little doubt that former voters of social democratic parties and the Communist Party now most often vote for Babis. This is because a left-wing electorate with truly anchored values never emerged in Czechia after 1989. “Strong anti-communism made it impossible to openly appeal to principles such as solidarity, justice or freedom in the material sense. For many people, it didn’t matter whether Babis or the socialists took care of higher pensions,” she says.
According to Smejkalova, the former prime minister’s success was also supported by fatigue with traditional parties, his image as a capable manager, and the fact that Czech politics remains highly personalised.
“Besides, Babis will never address social issues affecting his business – whether working conditions or the issue of taxes, which so desperately needs reform toward higher taxation of property and capital. The question is how the higher representation of progressive women will manifest itself – when, on the other hand, conservative, masculinist currents have also strengthened,” explains Smejkalova.
However, she believes that the failure to address social issues, which should be at the heart of public debate, remains a serious problem in Czech politics. “We have reached a paradoxical situation where drawing attention to social problems means being considered a victim of Russian propaganda,” she says.
According to Smejkalova, the governing coalition completely ignored issues that really concern people – affordable housing, food prices and healthcare – and instead “turned the campaign into an abstract fight to save democracy, and rightly lost.”
Smejkalova adds that the composition of the new Chamber of Deputies also reflects deep social inequality. “There will be 87 university graduates sitting in it, which is more than three times as many as there are in the Czech population,” she says. “The class bias of the legislature is enormous, and yet no one is concerned about it.”
In her opinion, such governance will once again be blind to the problems of all segments of society that did not get a say in the decision-making process.
