To grasp the seriousness of the current anti-government protests in Prague, one must rewind a bit. It’s been practically a 12 months because the billionaire Andrej Babiš and his get together, the Dissatisfied Residents’ Motion (ANO), misplaced the Czech parliamentary elections. Collectively together with his coalition companion, the Social Democrats (ČSSD), Babiš was defeated (simply barely) by a disparate bloc of 5 events, starting from the liberal centre-left Czech Pirate Occasion to the conservative centre-right Christian Democrats. Headed by the centre-right Civic Democrats (ODS), this shaky five-party coalition ran and received on an explicitly anti-corruption, anti-Babiš ticket.
The lion’s share of the work essential to mobilize voters towards Babiš was carried out by the Million Moments for Democracy motion led by a younger, inspiring pupil known as Mikuláš Minář. All of the arduous work of enlightening voters on Babiš’s secret pursuits and machinations, making certain adequate voter turnout and forging an unlikely coalition simply to take away Babiš from energy, bore fruit in the long run. The ex-PM has lately gone on trial in an EU subsidy fraud case on the Municipal Court docket in Prague, although he himself insists the trial is not more than a political witch hunt aimed toward stopping him from operating for Czech president within the upcoming January 2023 election.
The October 2021 elections introduced in different vital adjustments: for the primary time since 1989, the Communist Occasion fell wanting the 5% threshold required to take seats in parliament. Different populist, nationalist actions resembling Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), the Czech equal of the German AfD, additionally got here out of the elections notably diminished. Lower than a 12 months in the past, it due to this fact appeared the stability of forces in Czechia had tilted, considerably if not overwhelmingly, away from unscrupulous, corporatist populism and an anti-immigrant, anti-EU nationalist agenda to a extra principled, much less corrupt and safely pro-EU democratic politics.
But even this cautiously hopeful tackle the place Czechs could also be headed after ten years of Babišism seems too optimistic now. On 3 September, seventy thousand (if no more) gathered at Wenceslas Sq. in Prague to demand ‘Czechs First’. So it appears the anti-EU populists, nationalists and pro-Russian agitators are again in power, even when solely within the streets and never within the parliament (but). How did that occur?
The organizers of the protest are well-known figures related both straight with the parliamentary nationalists (the SPD) or with comparable, smaller groupings on the political fringe. Fairly a couple of of them first acquired a wider following through the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes as anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and peddlers of pseudo-science. They’ve now re-directed their pandemic-honed abilities towards the present price of residing disaster, taking part in on individuals’s comprehensible fears for the approaching winter. Not solely was the Czech core inflation price operating at practically 15% in August, however Czech winters are usually lengthy and harsh: an additional sweater just isn’t going to chop it in temperatures of ten and even twenty beneath zero.
Whereas inflating fears concerning the rising worth of gas, the organizers of the protest have additionally intentionally began stoking anti-immigrant sentiment towards Ukrainian refugees, of which there are formally over 4 hundred thousand within the Czech Republic. Outright lies and rumours are unfold on social media about BMW-driving Ukrainian males, flashing their newest iPhones, turning up simply to gather the over-generous social welfare – although many of the refugees are girls with youngsters. Social media additionally abound with rumours of Ukrainian president Zelenskiy renting out his Italian villa to Russians and so forth.
Importantly, all this resentment is re-cast in slogans that chime with Russian state propaganda. It’s no accident that among the many individuals related to the protests one finds a Czech contributor to the Russian Military TV channel Zvezda and the TV Rossiya state broadcaster. ‘We’re towards worth rises and towards the conflict’ runs one such SPD slogan. Consequently, rising gasoline, electrical energy and meals costs are used not simply accountable the EU for the inflation however to ‘unmask’ key EU insurance policies, such because the Inexperienced Deal and the European Vitality Alternate, as methods to make sure German supremacy in Europe. (The demand for nationwide sovereignty, no less than on the subject of electrical energy, sounds superficially believable as a result of the Czech Republic can export a surplus.) The Czech authorities is then denounced as a mere vassal to Berlin and Brussels and exhorted to place the Czechs first by declaring army neutrality; by placing a bilateral settlement on gasoline provides with Putin; and by demanding that Germany pay additional reparations for its Second World Struggle occupation.
Among the propaganda is past ridiculous, as when protesters demand that every one Ukrainian refugees be returned to Ukraine in order to not ‘dilute the nation’. Principally, nonetheless, the protest organizers are cleverly blurring the traces between believable concern and devious misinformation. Sadly, the Czech authorities has to date confirmed incapable of speaking and implementing its plans for the winter in such a manner as to assuage the actual, reputable fears of the genuinely susceptible, estimated to characterize an enormous half (20-35%) of the Czech inhabitants. Even worse, the Czech PM initially selected to dismiss the protesters en masse, lambasting them as not more than Putin’s stooges. The true fear is, as Mikulář Minář, the ex-leader of the Million Moments for Democracy motion has put it, that this demonstration was simply the tip of the iceberg: that for each protester standing in Wenceslaus Sq. on 3 September, there have been about seven sitting at residence, watching the protest on TV and silently agreeing that ‘Czechs [should come] first’ it doesn’t matter what. If Babiš have been to vow simply that, may he make a comeback but as the brand new Czech president?
This text first appeared in Dublin Review of Books on 1 October 2022.
Petřín, Prague, 2021. Creator: Draceane Supply: Wikimedia Commons
