Czech Republic:
Swing to Communists continues

The latest opinion polls confirm that support for the Communist Party of 
Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) is continuing to grow. The Party is already one 
of the strongest communist parties in Europe, with a dues-paying membership 
of 120,000 (in a population of 10 million), 24 MPs in the 200-member 
Chamber of Deputies and four Senators, more than 6,000 local councillors 
and over 750 mayors and deputy mayors.

The Czech Social Democrat Government is a minority government, kept in 
office by an agreement with the Civic Democrats, the main right-wing party, 
based on the two parties' common interest in:

(1) sidelining the other three parliamentary parties, principally through 
electoral reform (replacing proportional representation with a first-past-
the-post system); (2) continuing the post-1989 policies of restoring 
capitalism (the so-called "economic transformation", which has created 
record unemployment of 450,000 — 8.4 percent of the workforce); (3) 
realigning the Czech Republic internationally with the forces of 
imperialism and big capital, notably NATO and the European Union 
("integration with North Atlantic-European structures").

About a third of the Czechs who voted Social Democrat last year have now 
switched their support to the Communists.

The reasons include the Government's collaboration with the Civic Democrats 
and its support for the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, its failure to 
deal with rising unemployment and big business corruption and, not least, 
the Communist Party's work inside and outside Parliament for an alternative 
socialist policy.

The Communists are the only party whose members have not been implicated in 
big business and local government corruption and party funding scandals.

According to the pollsters, the Social Democrats have also lost support to 
the smaller right-wing parliamentary parties — the Christian Democrats and 
the Freedom Union.

If a general election were held now, the likelihood is that the three 
right-wing parties would increase their overall representation in the 200-
member Chamber of Deputies from their current 102 seats to something like 
115.

On the Communists' attitude to joining a coalition government, KSCM vice-
chair and MP Vaclav Exner wrote in Halo Noviny, the Party's daily, 
on July 21: "The conditions do not exist now for Communist participation in 
government, because we could not pursue or implement our basic programme.

"Our main task must be patient and persistent work to gradually create the 
conditions for an expansion of our involvement in public power."

He made it clear that the KSCM was not interested in being in government at 
any price. The Party would be seeking to widen support for its policies on 
the country's economic crisis, rising unemployment, housing, the crime wave 
and the "one-sided" character of the country's foreign policy.

Every society needed managing, he said, through institutions working to 
effective central and other plans, although production did not need to be 
planned down to the last nail.

"The Communists", he said, "are not preparing to nationalise, but they are 
preparing to broaden an extremely narrow social sector and, together with 
the people, bring about real improvement by, among other things, putting 
state-owned property to good use."

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Postmark Prague