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bne July 2017 Central Europe I 43
a series of corruption and spying scan- dals and a self-inflicted two-year reces- sion caused by its austerity obsession.
Yet the party’s support base was a Potemkin village. The party’s huge poll ratings from the mid-1990s to the mid-noughties should be cred- ited to its strong leaders – first Milos Zeman, then Jiri Paroubek – who mobilised a wide coalition of pro- test voters, using a populist style and aggressive campaigns against the ODS, targeting its corruption and the threat it posed to the welfare state.
When the party has been in govern- ment under progressive leaders – Vladi- mir Spidla (2001-2004) or Sobotka (2011+) – it has struggled to combine Western European social democratic values with the socially conservative and nationalistic instincts of its supporters.
The party’s support base remains the poorer, older and less-educated voters in shabby small towns and rust belts who have benefited little from the collapse
of communism, rather than the young, educated urban supporters of social democrat parties in Western Europe.
Moreover, many of these voters, together with much of the party’s largely elderly and declining membership, and its strong regional barons, look back
with nostalgia to the party’s halcyon days under Zeman, leader from 1993- 2001 – something that the president has used to undermine his successors and try to bend the party to his will. By doing so, he looks set to destroy the party he did so much to rebuild.
Sobotka’s agony over reconciling the party’s values with those of its vot- ers is symbolised by the government’s changing stance on refugee quotas.
Initially, Sobotka successfully main- tained a balancing act: he kept in good odour with Brussels and Prague’s liber- als by accepting a few token refugees, while at the same time making noises against quotas that kept nationalist sup- porters on board and kept the Visegrad Group of Central European countries united. The party’s ambiguous stance
was epitomised by the liberal Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek on the one side, with the more hardline Interior Minister Milan Chovanec on the other.
But it soon became clear that there was little to be gained electorally by mak- ing liberal gestures. The relatively small Prague liberal constituency remained put off by the party’s traditionalist wing, the persistent whiff of municipal corruption, and the CSSD’s failure to embrace modern issues such as envi- ronmentalism or gender politics.
Meanwhile, many of the party’s core supporters were being lured away by Babis’ populist sound bites against migration and Brussels, and his promise to root out corruption.
This year Sobotka changed tack, sacking Dienstbier, a leading liberal ally, and backing Chovanec’s populist opposition to receiving migrants.
Sobotka has also tried to shift the party leftwards, criticising multinationals and Brussels, and promising to raise taxes on the rich and big companies, impose a special tax on banks, and hike the minimum wage and benefits. Yet however smart that might have been tactically, these twists and turns still looked unconvincing to voters.
Sobotka's main achievement has been to be the first premier since Zeman in 1998-2002 to complete a full term in office. By Central European standards he is a decent, clean, professional politician, but he is also sorely lack- ing in vision, leadership or charisma.
Ruling in a grand coalition with Babis’ personal party since 2010, the Social Democrats have steered the govern- ment programme and presided over a revitalised economy, with record low unemployment, but most of the credit has gone to Babis as finance minister.
Ano, backed by Babis’ private for- tune, his media empire and a slick PR machine, is now 20 points ahead of the CSSD in the opinion polls and seems unassailable, even though it has no real party structure behind it,
and no ideology or programme, apart from its leader’s folksy populism.
Like Donald Trump, Babis is an elite, anti-elite populist. Babis grew up as part of the communist nomenklatura, and then after 1989 built an agro- chemical business, funded initially by mysterious foreign partners and boosted by his close links with politicians.
The country’s second richest man makes the classic snake oil promises of the businessman populist: that he will run the country as a business, that he is rich enough not to bother to steal, and that, as he understands financial shenani- gans, so he is able to stamp them out.
Whatever manoeuvres Sobotka has tried, they have failed to dent Ano’s poll lead. After attacking Babis’ clear conflicts of interest, his alleged tax evasion, and his dubious receipt of EU aid, in May Sobotka belatedly sacked him as finance minister, but this seems to have rebounded on him rather than the billionaire. Voters remain blasé about Babis’ financial affairs, and the probes by the Czech tax office and
EU anti-fraud office OLAF will prob- ably come too late to make a differ- ence, if they are not shelved anyway.
Anointing Zaoralek as election leader and prime ministerial candidate on
June 14, and making Chovanec acting party chairman, is the last gambit of
a desperate man. But, like Sobotka’s previous moves, it is hard to see how this triumvirate can turn round the party’s fortunes, and it may just end up causing confusion in the election campaign. It looks more like Sobotka’s way of spread- ing the blame for the fiasco to come.
Zaoralek may just become a stopgap leader who takes the rap for the party’s collapse. This could pave the way for Chovanec to take over and push the party in a more socially conservative and nationalist direction, perhaps as a sub- missive junior partner in a Babis govern- ment, as Zeman seems to want. If this happens, then the fall of Czech Social Democracy would indeed be complete, and the party could be marginalised like its Polish and Hungarian sister parties.
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