Social democratic government´s failures

The Social Democratic (CSSD) government of Milos Zeman has so far demonstrated it is lacking experience to run the country efficiently. The government's peculiar structure has also contributed to a series of recent failures.

A great majority of CSSD ministers have no previous government experience. This is what distinguishes the CSSD from democratic left parties in Hungary and Poland, whose top officials served in important managerial and government posts even before the fall of communism. The Stalinist nature of the Czechoslovak communist regime prevented the rise of a liberal leftist political elite.

Until the elections in June 1998, the political pendulum in the Czech Republic had not swung from the right to the left. Most prominent Social Democrats thus followed government affairs only as members of the opposition. Adhering to a highly partisan concept of politics, the coalition government of Vaclav Klaus excluded Social Democrats from posts even on the lower levels of civil service.

Given the lack of experience, it is therefore no surprise that the initial steps of the CSSD government have been at times amateurish. Zeman's statements, in which he compared Sudeten Germans to the Czech Communists and far-right Republicans have damaged Czech-German relations. On the domestic front, the CSSD has caused a controversy when it announced the government will attempt to regain a majority shares in the gas distribution company Transgas.

CSSD efforts to put some of its politicians on the boards of large private companies have been criticized as the party's attempt to use its political power to gain economic advantages. A secret document in which the government demanded that managers in state-controlled companies be screened, and possibly replaced, has also provoked a controversy. The fact the CSSD is trying to make sure that large state-controlled companies are run by trustworthy people is not as problematic as the fact the government decided to hide its intentions from the public. Questions have been raised as to why the government did so.

Yet another controversy has been generated by the government's decision to review the decision of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to start broadcasting to Iran and Iraq from Prague. When RFE/RL moved its headquarters to Prague in 1995 at the invitation of the Czech government, the government did not set any conditions on the station's editorial policies or the extent of its broadcasts. The government of Josef Tosovsky noted a few months ago, in response to RFE/RL's intention to broadcast to Iran, that deciding about where RFE/RL broadcasts is the station internal matter.

The US Congress has approved broadcasts to Iran and Iraq, and US President Bill Clinton signed the Congress's decision into law. The Zeman government now argues that it needs to discuss the station's plans to broadcast to Iraq from Prague with the US government and that it will review RFE/RL's broadcasts to Iran in light of possible security risks. It is certain that the Czech Republic will be criticized by some politicians in the US and by some European democracies for the government's cautiousness in this matter at a time when the country is aspiring to become a NATO member.

It is possible that the government will eventually learn how to avoid similar mistakes. Its internal structure, however, is likely to keep contributing to problems. The fact the government has four deputy prime ministers whose responsibilities are often overlapping with those of the ministers they supervise, has already caused problems. Czech foreign policy , in particular, seems to lack coordination.

In another development Deputy Prime Minister Pavel Rychetsky has criticized Finance Minster Ivo Svoboda and Jaromir Gregr as being prone to name their friends into important positions in state-controlled companies. Rychetsky hinted that the government's document, under which managers in such companies should be screened, was partly adopted to prevent ministers such as Svoboda and Gregr from giving lucrative jobs to their friends.

Rychetsky statements suggest that the government is far from being united, despite the fact it is a one-party government. Should internal disputes and lapses of judgment on part of individual ministers continue, Zeman will soon be forced to replace some of the government's more problematic members.

Reuters - 28. 8. 1998