The election that were meant to change it all

Czech Republic just elected its new parliament. Neither there was fire raining from the sky nor riders of apocalypse showed up afterwards as some predicted. Nevertheless this election brought significant changes into Czech political spectrum.

Who is the winner and what are his plans for the Czech Republic? What does it mean for Germany and rest of the EU? And last but definitely not least will he be actually even able to create a governmental coalition?

The parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic ended just a couple of hours ago. Some said that it was the most important election since the fall of communism 1989. Some said that those elections will determine the survival or fall of liberal democracy. It is hard to say, whether those claims were exaggerated or not.

What we do know is the actual outcome of the elections. Controversial movement ANO which belongs to the liberal ALDE family won. Crushingly. Its even more controversial leader, nicknamed by the foreign media as Czech Trump or Berlusconi von der Moldau who is currently facing criminal persecution for financial frauds, Andrej Babiš got 30 % of the votes.

This number is even more sensational taking into an account a fact that the second party get less than 12 % votes, which means that the gap between first and second biggest party is almost 20 %.

Everybody wants some

All together, ten political parties had the potential to pass the 5 % threshold and enter the parliament. Eventually nine of them managed to do so, which is still the highest number of parliamentary parties in Czech history.

As said before, ANO won with 29,8 %, conservative, Eurosceptic right wing ODS with 11, 3 % was silver and rebelling pirates ended up with 10, 8 % third. Right extremist SPD got 10, 7 %, communists 7, 8 % and currently senior governing social democratic party ended up with 7, 3 %. Talking about the central right democratic parties, Christian democrats got 5, 8, intellectual elites gave TOP09 5, 5 % and mayors from STAN ended up with 5, 2 %.

This election brought three big surprises. First of them is success of the Pirates who did not get over 2 % last time. It is believed that by voting for Pirates more educated and not so radical people showed their dissatisfaction with current political establishment.

Second surprise was a success of populist extreme right SPD. Leader of SPD is Tomio Okamura – half Czech half Japanese businessman who is fighting against immigrants, Islam and every single of those 12 refugees which are currently on the territory of the Czech Republic. One could say that the less educated people on the country voted for Okamura for the same reason as city liberals for the Pirates.

Last but definitely not the least shock was decay of the ruling Social democrats who won the election in 2013 with 21 %. This situation is most likely caused by combination of factors. One of the problems was that they were not able to communicate governmental successes to be their own. Secondly, by shifting his policy more to left Andrej Babiš managed to bring significant part of the CSSD voters to his side.

The overall election participation was 61 % which is in Czech context rather decent outcome.

What to expect while you are expecting

There are four possible scenarios for the future development of the CR which comes to mind.

1) Nightmare coalition: Firs of them is night-mare coalition created by the ANO, communists and populist radical right SPO. None of the potential parties openly refused to participate in the government with the remaining two. All together they would get 104 mandates.

2) Democratic coalition: Could all the six democratic parties collide together and create a pro-western, pro-democratic coalition? Not really. All of them do not make up together even 70 mandates….

3) Kaczynski style: There is question whether Andrej Babiš will be even able to create a governmental coalition. One might think that given his strong mandate he has many options. The opposite is the true. All the democratic parties and even Tomio Okamura agrees on one thing – they will not govern with any criminally persecuted people (indirectly referring to Babiš).
It is true that politicians make all types of promises before the elections which in many cases do not last even few hours after the vote countdown. Surprisingly disparate coalition are created in the “name of the greater good” and “for sake of liberal democracy” can even the biggest political opponents suddenly become best friends.

However this time it does not seem to be the case, all of the elected parties (with exception of communists) confirmed several times after the elections that (at least in this case) they will honour their promise.

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So what is left to do for Andrej Babiš? Will he be able to create a coalition by making offers of ministerial posts one cannot refuse? Or will he be forced to step down and name a new puppet party leader just as Jaroslaw Kaczynski did with Beata Szydlo?

That is yet to be seen, however talking about ANO and democratic parties coalition, the old version of coalition seems to be the most likely. ANO, social democrats and Christian democrats got all together 102 seats.

4) Snap elections: There is a chance that neither Andrej Babiš nor anyone else would be able to get the numbers to get a parliaments blessing for his new government. In that case, president would name a new prime minister who would form a temporary government of non-elected state officials. And the new campaign hassle would start again.
Let’s meet the winner

One way or the other, Andrej Babiš won the Czech elections without any doubt. What does his victory means for the rest of the Europe? What approach does he take towards the EU, NATO or the Euro?

Andrej Babiš is not in principal against the EU, he understands that for (economic not so much ideological or value-based) reasons the Czech Republic should remain in the EU. But he is everything but Euro-optimistic federalist who would be pushing the country more to the centre. The opposite is the truth, Andrej Babiš does not want the CR neither to be member of the core nor the Eurozone. He wants to renegotiate the mutual relations get opt out for common immigration and social policy. Also the referendum on Czexit is not completely out of questions.

Regarding NATO Andrej Babiš claims to honour Czech commitments and to increase the military spending to the 2 % GDP by 2024. Taken into an account that after four years with ANO defence minister the spending increased from 1, 1 % to 1, 2 %, once tends to be rather sceptical about this promise.

Andrej Babiš acknowledges the existence of radicalization, terrorism and cyber warfare and ANO program includes ways and measures to prevent its spread. It is quite a paradox because he still refuses to see Russia as a security threat. The question is why to build a cyber-warfare capacities when you refuse to point them at the country who has been systematically cyber-threatening you for the last couple of years.

China as another potential in security problem is not mentioned in ANO program at all. It is troubling, taken into an account its increasing influence over Czech Republic which among others resulted into unusual shift in Czech foreign policy…

 

Adéla Klečková

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