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June 16, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 4
To some extent its pre-eminence is a natural reflection of the fact that – unlike its neighbours, where social democrat parties began as rebranded communists – the CSSD dates
back to 1878. The party was a significant player throughout the interwar First Republic, and after the return of democracy in 1989 Milos Zeman was able to harness it to ride it back into government in 1998.
But more than that, Czechia always had a strong social democrat ethos, inculcated by its founder- president Tomas Masaryk, and this was never entirely buried, despite 40 years of communism and the free market ideology of Vaclav Klaus, the main architect of the country’s economic trans- formation in the early 1990s. The welfare state is one of the most generous in the region, university education remains free, the health service is good and still largely state-run, and unions are closely consulted through tripartite discussions.
The Czech Republic – which, unlike its neigh- bours, had a strong democratic tradition before communism – quickly became the most stable and Western of the new democracies in Central Europe. With the Social Democrats at the helm, the country looked to Germany and Austria as role models, and seemed an obvious candidate to become a member of the Eurozone.
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 credited to its strong leaders – first Zeman, then
Jiri Paroubek – who mobilised a wide coalition
of protest 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 government under progressive leaders – Vladimir Spidla (2001-2004) or Sobotka (2011+) – it has struggled to combine Western European social democratic values with the socially conservative and nationalistic in- stincts 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 so-
cial democrat parties in Western Europe. These marginalised and increasingly volatile voters cannot be taken for granted, because they are also fought over by the hardline Communist party, the strongest in the region, and an ever-changing assortment of extreme rightwing factions. And without them, the party is lost.
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 – some- thing 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.
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