Prague winter

What started as an embarrassment for Czech Prime Minister Stanislav Gross turned into a demonstration of the rising influence of the Communist party. When Mr. Gross couldn’t explain how he had financed the purchase of an expensive apartment, he lost a coalition partner and the parliamentary majority. His fate now depends on the Communists who last week refused to support a no-confidence vote in the parliament, thus helping the Social Democratic-led government to survive.

The prime minister’s willingness to rely on the Communists, if only for tacit support, has raised alarm in the Czech Republic. After all, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, as it is officially called, is an unreformed, hard-line party--the only one of its kind to have survived in Eastern Europe. While most Communist parties after 1989 transformed themselves into left-wing but democratic parties, the Czech Communists have staunchly refused to even drop the word “Communist” from the party’s name--let alone apologize for their past crimes. Despite their obstinacy, they won a solid 18% in the 2002 parliamentary elections.

Ironically, it is because the Czechs early on rose up against the reviled Communists that they still have to endure their rather numerous presence today.

After the reform period known as the Prague Spring was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968, some 500,000 reform-minded Communists were expelled from the party. While in the 1970s and 1980s the Communist parties in neighboring Poland and Hungary were able to gradually liberalize from within, the Czechoslovak Communist Party was turned into a bastion of neo-Stalinism. When the regimes began to crumble in 1989, both the Polish and the Hungarian Communist parties shed their Communist crusts and quickly transformed themselves into mainstream forces with social democratic leanings.

Lacking real reformists in their ranks, the Czechoslovak Communists simply stuck to their ideology. Their strategy was to become a far left alternative to the Social Democratic Party, which had been eliminated after the Communist putsch in 1948 but was successfully revived after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Having finally disposed the Communists from power, the new democratic forces could not muster enough resolve to ban the party. Some believed the Communists would simply fade away, as most of their supporters after 1989 were older people. Others argued that they should not tarnish their newly-won freedom by banning political opponents, which they considered as undemocratic. And so the Communist Party was allowed to exist even after the Czech parliament passed a law in 1993, denouncing the Communist regime and its ideology as criminal.

As a result, a form of political schizophrenia developed in the Czech Republic. On the one hand, cooperation with the Communists became a taboo. But on the other hand, the Communists were allowed to stand for parliamentary elections, giving the party a high degree of publicity and legitimacy.

This anomaly actually worked in their favor. For the past 15 years now, the Communists were excluded from any government responsibilities and could therefore enjoy the comfortable position of a protest party during the inevitably messy transition period. They did not have to carry the burden of necessary but unpopular economic reforms and, lacking opportunity, they have not been involved in any of the various financial scandals linked to the privatization of state assets. As a result, we have arrived at the absurd situation where an increasing number of young people, who were still children when the regime collapsed, believe the Communist Party is the only “clean” party around.

Even more damaging for the political culture of the Czech Republic, the Communists, thanks to their populist slogans, have been able to fill the political gap left behind by the demise of the far-right Republican Party. Catering to both ends of the political spectrum, the Communists manage to represent not only those voters for whom the Social Democrats are not sufficiently leftist but also those who are nationalists, xenophobic and anti-European. The party is the staunchest opponent to any reconciliation with the Sudeten Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II.

It would be unjust, though, to describe all the supporters of the Communist Party simply as extremists. There are social groups in the Czech Republic that have been left behind in the rapid process of economic transformation--and the Communists give those people a voice.

Until last week, however, it was unimaginable that any Czech government would openly or covertly rely on the Communists for support. Given the unstable coalition-building in the Czech parliament, though, it was probably only a question of time until the Communists, with one fifth of seats in the lower house, would succeed to pierce through that cordon sanitaire.

For several years, they have already been in various coalitions at the municipal level. And while President Vaclav Havel resolutely refused to include the Communist Party in any political deals, his successor, Vaclav Klaus, asked the Communists two years ago to support his election to the post. They obliged.

The largest opposition group, the conservative Civic Democratic Party (which Mr. Klaus founded) has not decisively distanced itself from the Communists. On several occasions, the two parties actually joined forces in (unsuccessful) no-confidence votes and to kill government reform plans. And in the current crisis, the Civic Democrats asked the Communists to support the no-confidence vote but then accused the Social Democrats of political cynicism when it survived thanks to the Communists ignoring that call.

The greatest hope for changes in the Czech Communist Party may come, perhaps surprisingly, from the country’s membership in the European Union. Six communists have been elected to the European Parliament even though the party had opposed membership. Some reform-minded leaders of the party have suggested that the party will have to change if it ever wants to play an important role in Europe. Thus, the Czech Republic’s EU membership may in the end prompt the Communists to initiate the kind of reforms that it has so stubbornly avoided under domestic pressure.

Until that happens, it is the responsibility of all mainstream parties to keep them at arm’s length to preserve the political culture and democratic principles generations of Czechs had been denied when the Communists were in power.

World Street Journal - 7. 4. 2005