So, the Czech elections...
5. 10. 2025 / Joseph Grim Feinberg
čas čtení
5 minut
I entered with the consolation that, since all the parties with a
chance of making it to parliament were bad, and there was no plausible
possibility of any decent ruling coalition after elections, there was no
need to be on the edge of our seats. All possible outcomes would be
horrible. Still...
WTF is a party of car-driving "Motorists" doing in any century, much less the current one, a party whose only purpose is to say Fuck off to the human race because a few of us upper middle-class people want to be able to drive fast cars and live the dream of 1950 (seasoned with a dose of far-right xenophobia and Hitlerist flirtation)? (6.77% of the vote)
The long-standing, proudly racist far right, the SPD, won 7.87%, less than expected, so--is this the kind of small consolation we're supposed to accept these days?
The Pirate Party could pass for a decent centrist-liberal party, if only they didn't pretend they were "pirates" while being the most craven party in the Czech system, eternally promising to uphold the system as it is, purging anyone with the slightest vision of an alternative future from the party leadership, pursuing progressive policy only when no one's paying attention, and then apologizing as soon as the media notices, refusing to stick to their guns on anything, and acting deathly afraid of the accusation that they might be "leftist" (more on that below). 8.97% - could have been better could have been worse.
The "Mayors and Independents" party, completely pointless, lacking in ideas, claiming competence on the basis that they're so busy being mayors they might as well take a side job at being parliamentarians too; at least they have the appeal of not standing for anything when most of the ideas on offer are terrible. 11.23% of the vote wasted on a nothing-party. Or more optimistically: 11.23% of the vote that at least didn't go to all the other terrible parties.
"SPOLU" (Together), a reactionary conservative party that still lives in the early 1990s, thinks the greatest threat to democracy is "communism," by which it variously means any "populist" politician they happen to be competing with, or any attempt to improve the welfare state and regulate business; this, the most anti-change of all imaginable parties somehow claimed in the last elections to be the party of "change," and have been governing the last 4 years by telling people that the radical decline of real wages due to inflation is all OK because we're also "consolidating" the budget for the sake of future generations (read, we're helping the world unravel for the sake of future generations). They ran this time as the supposed last-ditch protectors democracy against the threat of authoritarianism, which is a real threat, but they are among the least convincing defenders, and they keep confusing democracy with "the West" and authoritarianism with "the East," turning the struggle for democracy into a de facto racial-civilizationist struggle against Easterners. 23.36%, far more than they deserved; but then, all the parties in parliament got far more than they deserved, so OK. But since SPOLU has a large ultra-conservative faction, I won't be surprised if they respond to this defeat by giving up on the rhetoric of defending democracy and try instead to latch onto the new right (finally leaving the early 90s by entering a Trumpian version of 1950, as their path to the future).
ANO, the party of Andrej Babiš, another party with no ideology, but increasingly willing to latch onto the far right when rejected by the center. 34.51%
And finally: STAČILO!, with 4.30%, below the threshold for entering parliament, after polls expected them to get between 5% and 10%.. Maybe the biggest tragedy of them all. The only major party that has the decency at least to want to be leftist, which hoped to capitalize on economic anger at the government's anti-social policies, and decided the best way to do this was by combining leftist economic messages with conservative nationalist and anti-woke cultural messages, as traditional Communists allied with traditional conservatives who shared a distaste for NATO and Western Europe, and then finally persuaded some regular Social Democrats to join in, as their only chance of making it into parliament.
Not only did they sacrifice their leftist identity by allying with national-conservatives, and thus give the mainstream media the image it loves best, of the left as a band of conservative anti-progress crusaders bent on turning the country into a new Purtinesque Russia (even while most of the political parties keep railing against the supposed dominance of genderism and wokism, which they also blame on the left)--they did all that, and they still lost. On the one hand, at least they deserved to be punished rather than rewarded for this move; but on the other hand, it means yet another parliament without a single representative who even wants to be leftist, and it means a government almost guaranteed to need the support of the two far-right parties (the SPD and the "Motorists").
Meanwhile, the "left" just becomes a punching bag for everything the old and new establishment (the neoliberal conservative right and the illiberal/far right) despises. If it's conservative Putinism, the backward East, or if it's radical genderism and wokism, utopian imaginings, even the humble vision of a future that escapes total ecological destruction, it's all the left. They can all fight against the left, which is powerless, without needing to face the real consequences of their policies, which are total bullshit.
526
Diskuse