Czech parliamentary elections.
Big gains for the Communists

by Ken Biggs editor of Postmark Prague

The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) made sweeping gains in 
Saturday's (June 14) general election. Despite the best efforts of the 
mostly German-owned right-wing Czech press and a viciously anti-communist 
campaign by state-run TV and its political opponents, there will be 41 
Communists in the new 200-member Chamber of Deputies compared with 24 in 
the outgoing legislature.

The Communists increased their share of the poll from 11% at the 1998 
election to 18.5% and gained seats from all of the three other 
parliamentary parties. These included the ruling Social Democrats and the 
right-wing party which kept their minority government in office for the 
past four years, Thatcherite ex-premier Vaclav Klaus's Civic Democrats.

Turnout was down sharply from 74% at the 1998 election to 58.3%, as voters 
stayed away in droves in protest at widespread political corruption 
implicating all parties except the Communists, the political manipulation 
after the 1998 election and at the contempt shown for the views of ordinary 
people since the 1989 "velvet" counter-revolution.

President Vaclav Havel was to hold talks with leaders of the three 
"democratic" (i.e. right-wing) parties on Sunday. Once again he has 
excluded Communist leaders from talks at Prague Castle, despite the fact 
that they now represent almost one in five of those who voted on Friday and 
Saturday.

Havel, who will step down as Czech President in January, thus continues to 
violate his oath of office which obliges him to act in the name of all ten 
million Czechs.

Vaclav Spidla, leader of the pro-NATO and pro-EU Social Democrats, claimed 
victory as head of the biggest party in the Chamber of Deputies on Saturday 
evening, but his less-than-jubilant face said it all. His party's vote was 
well down and it lost four seats to the Communists.

President Havel is expected to invite Spidla to form a new coalition 
government — a process which is expected to take weeks.

Asked about the possibility of forming a "left-wing coalition government" 
with the Communists, he rejected the idea out of hand, citing a past Social 
Democratic Party Congress resolution banning cooperation with the Communist 
Party at national level.

Spidla's other options are a repeat of the Social Democrats' disastrous 
alliance with Klaus's Civic Democrats or a coalition with the right-wing 2-
Party Coalition. Another alliance with the Civic Democrats is highly 
unlikely, since it would be more than rank-and-file Social Democrat voters 
could stomach.

The previous contractual alliance between the two parties signed in July 
1998 forced the Social Democrats to abandon many of the progressive social 
policies on which it won the 1998 election and to embark on a programme of 
all-out privatisation.

Apart from that, the Civic Democrats also lost heavily despite a hugely 
costly and counter-productive campaign. Klaus, for example, spent millions 
on a pre-recorded cell phone message delivered to hundreds of thousands 
voters urging them specifically not to vote communist.

The two-party coalition consists of the rump of a right-wing four-party 
coalition which collapsed earlier this year, largely as a result of 
conflicting personal ambitions and rivalries.

What remains is a marriage of convenience between the right-wing 
fundamentalist Freedom Union (a 1998 breakaway from the Civic Democrats) 
and the right-of-centre Christian Democrats, a party which is close to the 
Czech Roman Catholic hiererachy and champions its demand for the 
restoration of church property and land confiscated by the state even 
before the Communists and their allies took power in February 1948.

Among the retiring Freedom Union MPs who lost their seats were former 
Finance Minister Ivan Filip, who was arrested in Cuba last year while on a 
US-sponsored counter-revolutionary mission, and Petr Mares, the author of a 
plan to introduce tuition fees at Czech universities.

* * *

Full details of the Czech election results and an analysis by a senior 
Communist Party adviser will appear in the July-August issue of Postmark 
Prague. Copies can be ordered by writing to PP, PO Box 42, 182 
21 Prague 8, Czech Republic or by e-mailing postmarkprague@cmail.cz