We Must Be Building the Left-Right Conflict: Czech Social Democracy After the 2017 Parliamentary Elections

By Patrik Eichler. Journalist and vice-director of Masaryk Democratic Academy, think-tank linked to the Czech Social .

Bohuslav Sobotka was a good Prime Minister. When the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD, S&D) entered the government at the beginning of 2014, its programme was well- prepared and it had people with experience who managed well to lead the ministries they oversaw as well as to handle the bureaucracy associated. This is what distinguished them from the representatives of the coalition partner of the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL, EPP) and the businessmen who came up from the political movement ANO (ALDE). ČSSD also carried through a range of their election promises and acted as the party maintaining and improving the rules for a functioning welfare state in the .

Bohuslav Sobotka's government thus abolished the second pillar of the pension system, which had been pouring the public funding into the hands of private companies. On the request of ČSSD, fees for medical treatment were abolished (everything became covered by public insurance again). The government led by ČSSD put into practice the Civil Service Act with the intention of professionalizing the civil service. And finally, the government led by ČSSD increased wages, salaries and pensions. Let's just mention here that under the government of Bohuslav Sobotka, the minimum wage increased from €314 to €451 (in conversion), an increase of almost 44%.

During the whole term in office, though, ČSSD failed to present its own successes to the public and it let Andrej Babiš claim most of these successes in the media. It was the leader of the political movement ANO, and for a long time also Minister of Finance, Andrej Babiš who would announce at press conferences that he "found money" on pensions here, on wages there, although he had to be outvoted at the cabinet meeting or forced to give in after harsh negotiations. This interpretation was adopted by several media which were directly owned by Andrej Babiš and which are now held in trust by his lawyers.

Here, ČSSD have not paid for lack of competence to govern. They have never lacked this competence. They have paid for personal weakness when it comes to the presentation of the outcomes of the government’s work. They have paid for the incompetence to notify their own members about the planned steps so they would not learn even the important decisions – including once the announcement of a tax reform plan – from newspapers, but at least from a party newsletter. Briefly put: it paid for a long-term neglect of its internal structures and of working with its own members.

No Great Election Expectations

Internal problems of the party and falling polling preferences led to the change of the leader of ČSSD in June 2017. Bohuslav Sobotka resigned and stayed on as the Prime Minister. Lubomír Zaorálek (an experienced politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Sobotka's cabinet)

became the campaign leader. It was only under his lead when the party began to prepare the election campaign with higher intensity.

The main topics of the social democratic campaign were: demand for further wage increase, keeping free public health care and the promise of further increase of pensions. All the major party figures agreed to the campaign topics. ČSSD deliberately chose these topics to put emphasis on the left-right divide of the society and made social issues the axis of the election fight. But only a minority of the parties answered this call, in particular the historical rival of the social democrats - Civic Democratic Party (ODS, ECR). This right-wing, national- oriented party, by the end of the campaign, even repeatedly claimed that it was them who brought the topic of wage increase to the election debate.

However, the axis of the election fight – unfortunately for the left – consisted of the figure of Andrej Babiš. This gained importance especially after the police, in mid-August, asked the Chamber of Deputies to give consent to the prosecution of Andrej Babiš, because of a possible misuse of European subsidies for the construction of a family estate and a conference centre. That moment only reinforced the basic message of his campaign: I, Andrej Babiš, am the only just political force in this country and everyone else, the other established political parties in particular, steals.

What Happened in the Society

Social democracy failed to enforce social issues as the main dividing axis of the election debate. The axis, similarly to France for instance, was formed by nationalist issues; an issue of closing or opening the society, an issue of defining each theme of conversation against Europe: who wants to go further away from "the dictate of Brussels", how much less should "Brussels" regulate life in the Czech Republic. The fascistic movement Freedom and Direct Democracy put a great emphasis on anti-Islamic racism, which was enough for the fourth place in the elections.

In a disadvantageous public debate climate, ČSSD started their campaign too late. Babis’s political movement, YES (ANO), had been leading their campaign in the media for the entire four years. It is also likely that ČSSD failed to deliver the very message of the campaign to a significant part of the electorate. It is a matter that will require further analysis, nevertheless it is possible that the tendency of social networks to create closed social groups sharing the same opinion in connection with ad targeting not only on social networks, but also elsewhere on the Internet, could have significantly weakened the effectiveness of online advertising. But there were more problems, among which was the actual absence of the campaign leader when campaigning in the capital.

The last major point that deepened the fall in voter support for the Social Democrats was the affair with signing an agreement between the Ministry of Industry and some foreign company concerning the future conditions of non-ferrous metals mining in Northern Bohemia. Thus, four days before the elections, the Chamber of Deputies was discussing this affair triggered by the political movement YES (ANO). And ČSSD faced attacks for stealing from the national wealth. Even on this attack, the party failed to respond effectively, be it in public, or inwards.

Where Now

Mismanaging changes brought by leading a campaign in the digital age, a disadvantageous axis of the election fight and an affair with non-ferrous metals mining have likely brought the social democrats to the 7.27% election result and only to the sixth place out of nine parties represented in the Chamber of Deputies.

The problems with the transformation of the conflict defining the political axis will be hardly solved by ČSSD in the Czech Republic alone. It is left to work on emphasising the right-left axis as that which is decisive for future voters. If they want to think of their own future, they must now focus on the municipal elections that will be held in the fall of 2018, on stabilizing the party’s own membership, and on transforming the party management to match not only the worsening financial situation, but especially the technical ways of conducting campaigns in the 21st century.