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June 16, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
Russian hooligans at the 2018 World Cup and that the tournament will be “a festival of violence” for some locals.
“I am more afraid of the extortionists rather than the hooligans,” Daly, a media executive, tells
bne IntelliNews after landing in Moscow. “I imag- ine the riot police will keep them in check. I have been to Champions League matches before in Russia and the pitch was ring-fenced by soldiers.”
Daly, who has tickets for three games in Moscow, Kazan and St Petersburg, travelled on a “Fan ID” rather than a visa, but there was confusion when he arrived from in Moscow from Manchester via
The strange death of Social Democratic Czechia
electoral drubbing would be a body blow to the already heavily indebted party because it gets most of its funding from the state according to its vote. With no charismatic leader waiting in the wings, its future looks bleak.
The Czech Republic was once an island of stabil- ity and moderation in Central Europe. Now, with growing voter volatility and the looming collapse of its last strong traditional party, it looks as if will join its neighbours in embracing populism and picking fights with Brussels, with grave risks for its democracy and European unity.
“We face destruction of the whole party system,” Jiri Dienstbier, a former Social Democrat human rights minister, told bne IntelliNews earlier this year. “The CSSD is now at breaking point. The next general election will decide whether it will survive as a mainstream party.”
Frankfurt. “Lufthansa didn’t have a clue what it was and the immigration in Moscow were baffled, so I had to wait,” says Daly, who imagines the sys- tem will be bedded down by the summer of 2018.
Tickets for the World Cup itself have been priced from $105 to a record $1,050 – putting attendance out of the pockets of many of the locals, who earn about $500 a month on average.
Western sponsors have also so far been slow to come on board due to sanctions and Russia’s growing international isolation. Both Sony and Emirates are believed to have backed away from packages.
who launched his own Ano party, is poised to seize power in October, with the open support of President Milos Zeman, a former Social Democrat and longstanding bitter enemy of Sobotka whom he has worked ceaselessly to undermine.
Czech society is sleepwalking towards giving Babis the strongest political power since the restoration of democracy a quarter of a century ago. Voters are ignoring Sobotka’s warnings of the danger this could pose. “I would hate to see how the power pact between Babis and Zeman, and its extension into the future through the election, would start to turn Czechia into an authoritarian society,” the prime minister said in an interview with the Respekt weekly in May.
Social Democrats have had a leading position
in Czech politics for the last 20 years, winning most votes in all but one of the last five elections, and leading governments for more than half
that period. The party should by rights have dominated the political scene after the 2013 implosion of its main rival, the rightwing Civic Democrats (ODS), after a series of corruption and spying scandals and a self-inflicted two-year recession caused by its austerity obsession.
Andrej Babis, the agro-chemicals billionaire