Page 51 - bneMagazine March 2023 oil discount

bne March 2023 Central Europe I 51
Babis even said during a TV debate on January 22 that he would not send Czech troops to defend Poland or the Baltic states in the event of a Russian invasion, a statement he later retracted.
Babis’ message was reinforced by Russian disinformation, including video footage circulating on social media that appeared to have been carefully edited so as to falsely depict Pavel advocating war against Russia.
The tension between Babis’ contrasting tactical approaches to the two mutually exclusive electorates eventually backfired, with liberal voters flocking to Pavel out of fear of Babis’ extremism, while the far-right SPD party still
OBITUARY
refused to back Babis. Turnout was a record 70.2%.
Pavel has had a distinguished military career, becoming the chief of the general staff and, from 2015 to 2018, the chairman of the Nato military committee, the highest Nato position reached by an officer from a former Warsaw Pact country.
Pavel was also the commander of
the Czech unit on the UNPROFOR mission in the former Yugoslavia, during which in 1993 he led a unit that rescued 55 French soldiers who were under bombardment, for which he was awarded the Legion of Honour.
Pavel will mark a sharp break with Zeman, who could not stand again, when he takes over as president in March. Zeman, a strong ally of Babis, had endorsed his fellow populist in the election.
Yet Pavel has positioned himself slightly to the left of the government, criticising it for not doing enough to help ordinary people, and he has supported same-sex marriage, which is not in the coalition programme.
In foreign affairs, where the president has more powers, he will be a strong supporter of Nato as well as the EU, having backed adoption of the euro, while the government is still split on the issue.
Lubomir Strougal, longest serving
Czechoslovak prime minister Albin Sybera in Prague
Lubomir Strougal, who spent over 18 years as prime minister during the so-called normalisation era of communist Czechoslovakia, has
died aged 98. Despite being seen as
a reform-oriented communist late in his career, Strougal also personified the stiff reactionary regime that replaced the "socialism with a human face" of the Prague Spring following the Soviet- led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
Strougal managed to hold on to high-ranking positions in most of the different eras of communist rule in Czechoslovakia and was often described as a pragmatic technocrat of power.
After Czechoslovak Stalinism in the late 40s and early 50s, in spring 1968, the Communist party led by Alexandr Dubcek liberalised Czechoslovakia
to the point that Moscow invaded the country and installed a loyalist regime. Under a process of so-called "normalisation", this hardline regime held on to its hawkish positions even
during the reform period of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, before it was eventually brought down by the Velvet Revolution in November 1989.
As prime minister from 1970,
Strougal took a pragmatic approach
to the all-encompassing reality of Czechoslovak society subjugated on all levels of public life to Russian orders. “Small allied countries are just another form of Russian gubernia [provincial unit],“ Strougal wrote in his memoirs.
“What did people want? Simply put, they wanted [to choose from] an offer they knew from the ordinary catalogues in the West,” Strougal summed up the then state of society.
Strougal’s dry assessment serves well to depict the hollowness of normalisation- era politics. Voting was mandatory,
but the presence of Soviet troops and loyalist elites dependent on Moscow
for their careers rendered meaningful changes unrealistic. Just a couple of years after the political fervour of 1968,
Czechoslovakia turned into the most conservative of the Central European communist regimes.
The then-dissident Michael Zantovsky recalled that when Strougal’s daughter Eva married journalist Jiri Janousek in 1977, guests were given fresh copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses while these were banned in ordinary book stores.
Lubomir Strougal, the prime minister of Czechoslovakia from 1970 to 1988.
www.bne.eu