An atmosphere of fear: What to do with a political party that has slipped out of your hands?
Marek Švehla
Respekt 38 | 20. - 26. September 2010, pp 14-15
In České Budějovice and two former district capitals in South Bohemia—Písek and Strakonice—the tension around the upcoming municipal elections is especially high. The people running against ODS are its own members, all in all individuals who led the city in previous years. From their perspective they're the “true” ODS: they're the people who founded it, who led it through the crisis of the party schism at the end of the 90's and then for the last decade governed from the area's town halls more or less successfully. Clearly, many of them would have nothing against going off into political retirement, but now they're resisting that and putting up candidate lists against their own party. Their successors have put them aside with a fierceness that goes beyond previous custom. And now everyone's waiting to find out to what extent the voters will bless this new “policy” with their votes.
We have a mandate
In June ODS chairman Petr Nečas turned back an attack of the so-called godfathers on the vice-chair positions in his party, but for now that hasn't changed anything out in the provinces. For instance, in the just-mentioned České Budějovice (a detailed article about the local “godfather” Pavel Dlouhý is on p. 44), ODS has changed completely. Those who represented some sort of continuity or tradition are all gone. The only one left is the former regional governor Jan Zahradník who says he feels a responsibility not to abandon his political brand.
Instead, ODS is quickly turning into a party whose membership card is a good thing to have in your pocket when you're competing for public purchases or subsidies from the European Union. Cynical managers and entrepreneurs are joining, who will tell you in informal conversation that that's their only interest in it. This didn't happen from one day to the next: it's a long-run trend, and some of the people now leaving ODS feeling burned have also played a role in it. The previous chairman also contributed by ignoring the running of the party, and he himself—whether deservedly or not—was a symbol of the linking up of clientelistic connections with entrepreneurs and lobbyists.
We're in a situation where the main advisor to the premier says openly in a newspaper interview that in his party there aren't discussions about ideas and programs anymore, but only about positions and spheres of influence. That's not all: in the regions, this party has created an atmosphere of fear that, 20 years after the overthow [of communism], can really catch a disinterested observer off guard. Of course this isn't the immediate fear for one's life, for one's children, for existence as such. It's fear of the petty revenge of people who control the local offices and allocate public money. Still, it's not to be belittled: people who are energetic, self-confident and decidedly not poor openly admit that they are afraid to talk about their work and about their town, on the basis of previous experiences with cynics who are absolutely convinced that they got a mandate and everything belongs to them. Thanks to their sharp elbows they've occupied important positions and now they're bending the rules so that they benefit only them and their allies.
You can't do that when you're in power
In South Bohemia, which is especially affected by this fear, you encounter the opinion that sure, it's bad, but it doesn't have any fundamental effect on the life of the town. The buses run, the streets get cleaned up, the town is blooming, and regular people don't notice much of anything. In practice that's true to a certain extent. The problem is that at any given moment we don't know how bad the situation actually is. There's no social contract being written with the “godfathers” and the clientelistic networks about how far they're willing to go. We don't know whether the right to a fair division of public purchasing is the last thing that they've decided to take from us. What's more, society functions on the basis of many unwritten rules which we're used to following. And if somebody suddenly stops doing that, we won't be able to oppose it quickly enough.
Naturally, the October elections are an opportunity for dealing out new hands. But what if the “godfathers” and their suite win again? Does that mean that nothing's going on? Hardly. It could mean that the voters don't believe that the other side will do any better.
Given the imperfection of an electoral purge, there must be other mechanisms for keeping politics transparent and trustworthy. Political parties certainly have those means. For instance, Tom Zajíček—for many years the chair of the South Bohemian ODS, now in his home organization a party dissident and at the same time paradoxically an advisor to the premier from that same party—has looked at today's conditions in ODS up-close and says that the situation is very serious and that the leadership should act decisively: say, take away the party membership of one whole region and build up the party anew in the regions, even at the expense of temporary electoral decline. Nečas's vice-chair Pavel Blažek thinks that at a time when the party is in power, such a step is entirely unrealistic. Who knows—ODS now has a new competitor on the right and nowhere is it written that it can't quite quickly fall below the line of electability.
What ODS can do while it's in power is give as much support as possible to its own people who are trying to carry out some sort of purge, such as Alexandr Vondra at the ministry of defense. As we see with the various attacks on him, it's not a simple thing to do and he shouldn't left to do it on his own.
