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The Parliamentary Election in the Czech Republic, May 2010

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The Parliamentary Election in the Czech Republic, May 2010 238 Notes on Recent Elections / Electoral Studies 30 (2011) 223–244 The parliamentary election in the Czech Republic, May 2010 Mary Stegmaier a,*, Klára Vlachová b,1 a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22904, USA b Institute of Sociology AS CR, Jilská 1, 110 00, Praha 1, Czech Republic article info Article history: Received 8 October 2010 Accepted 13 January 2011 The May 28 – 29, 2010 Czech parliamentary elections the polls - 36% and 31.5% respectively. The Communists resulted in a dramatic upheaval to what had been a rela- (16%), Greens (7%), and the KDU-CSL (5%) were the only tively stable political landscape. The Christian Democratic other parties generating enough support to surpass the 5% Party (KDU-CSL) and the Green Party failed to reach the 5% electoral threshold.3 electoral threshold while two new parties, TOP 09 and After the governing coalition failed to win parliamen- Public Affairs, burst onto the scene with surprising strength. tary support in the March 2009 vote, a caretaker govern- The two pillars of the party system, the Civic Democrats ment of experts, led by Jan Fischer, who had been serving as (ODS) and the Social Democrats (CSSD), lost substantial the President of the Czech Statistical Office, governed with support. Only the Communist Party (KSCM) maintained its support from the ODS and CSSD. The two parties agreed to standing by winning 26 of 200 seats. hold early parliamentary elections instead of waiting until The major shake-up broke the pattern of bare majority the end of the regular 4-year term (June 2010). After both or minority governments. Czech voters gave the center- the Chamber and the Senate passed a constitutional right parties a solid majority, making the coalition forma- amendment for early elections, the President announced tion process easier than in the past. The new government of October 9–10, 2009 as the election date. the ODS, TOP 09 and Public Affairs is led by ODS leader Petr As the parties began their campaign preparations during Necas. President Václav Klaus appointed the government summer, changes in the party system were underway. Mir- on July 13 and it won the parliamentary vote of confidence oslav Kalousek, former Minister of Finance in the Topolánek on August 10, 2010. government, left the KDU-CSL and established the center- right party TOP 09 and the popular Karel Schwarzenberg, Topolánek’s Foreign Minister, became the party’s leader. The 1. Background party quickly became a viable political contender. Public Affairs (VV) also made its move to become The June 2006 parliamentary elections resulted in a national party with an anti-corruption platform. The party a minority coalition of the ODS, KDU-CSL, and the Greens, was established in 2001 as a municipal party in Prague and led by ODS Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek (for details on by 2006 it had expanded across the country to become the the 2006 election, see Plecitá-Vlachová and Stegmaier, second strongest party in municipal-level government. The 2008). This tenuous coalition survived four votes of no- selection of Radek John, former journalist for TV NOVA, as confidence, but narrowly lost the fifth no-confidence vote the party’s leader in June 2009, marked the beginning of the in March 2009 with 101 of the 200 members in parliament change from a local to national party. In the run-up to the voting against the government. While other important expected October 2009 elections, the party polled only political events took place between 2006 and March 2009 - around 1%; it wasn’t until February 2010, that support most notably the 2008 Presidential Election where Klaus crossed the 5% threshold. won his second term in the 3rd round of the second elec- The October 2009 election campaign was underway and tion and the CSSD victory in all 13 regional elections in election authorities had already spent 122 million crowns4, October 20082 – we focus here on the events that precip- when the Czech Constitutional Court agreed to hear an MP’s itated the dramatic 2010 election results. challenge to the early election. Just a month before the At the start of 2009, the party system and support levels election, the court ruled the early election unconstitutional, remained similar to the 2002 and 2006 election results arguing that the one-time amendment shortening the with the CSSD and ODS receiving the strongest backing in Chamber’s term was a breach of the constitution’s core. The only way early elections could be held would be to amend the constitution to create a permanent mechanism for early * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 434 924 6739. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Stegmaier), klara.ple- [email protected] (K. Vlachová). 1 Tel.: þ420 221 183 571. 3 CVVM March 2009 report, see graph 2: http://www.cvvm.cas.cz/upl/ 2 For an overview of the regional election results, see: http://www. zpravy/100882s_pv90318.pdf volby.cz/pls/kz2008/kz62?xjazyk¼EN&xdatum¼20081017 4 www.radio.cz/en/news/119921 Notes on Recent Elections / Electoral Studies 30 (2011) 223–244 239 elections. The two chambers quickly passed an amendment 2006 voters could cast up to 2 preference votes to change that allowed the Chamber to dissolve itself with support the order of candidates on the party list, but in 2010 voters from three-fifths of the MPs. PM Fischer and President Klaus had up to 4 preference votes. In the 1990s, Czech voters had signed the amendment which went into effect on 4 preference votes and an individual candidate had to September 14. Just before the vote in the Chamber on its receive at least 10% of the vote, counted from all votes the dissolution which would have allowed the early elections to party received in an electoral region, to move up the party take place in November, the CSSD announced that it no list. The electoral reform passed in 2000 during the longer supported early elections. Thus, the elections would “opposition agreement” period (Roberts, 2003) reduced the be postponed until the end of the 4-year term. number of preferential votes to 2, and lowered the prefer- ence vote requirement from 10% to 7% (Charvát, 2010). While substantial parts of the reform were abolished by the 2. Electoral campaign Constitutional Court, the reduction in preferential votes and the 7% requirement were included in the 2002 election act. After a year in power, the caretaker government con- The return to 4 preferential votes along with a 5% threshold tinued to receive high marks from the Czech public. In April, to move up the party list was proposed by Topolánek’s PM Fischer’s approval rating stood at 73% compared, for government as a step toward increased personalization of example, to Topolánek’s rating of 40% in February 2009, elections and more open lists. These changes were adopted before the fall of his government.5 But, Fischer was not in October 2006 (Voda and Pink, 2010), and as we note later, a politician and had decided not to run for office. Therefore, they had an impact on the election results. voters could not reward (or punish) him at election time (Fiorina,1981; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2008). Instead, the caretaker government with its general level of civility and 4. Election results diplomacy demonstrated that the Czech political scene could be “cleaner” and prompted the public’s desire for political Voter turnout was 62.6%, a slight drop from 65% in 2006. change. Table 1 presents the 2010 and 2006 election results for parties that received more than 1% of the vote in either of An unplanned shake-up occurred within the ODS lead- 7 ership just 3 months before the election. Topolánek step- these elections. In 2010, 27 parties, unions, or blocks competed in the election. Five parties surpassed the 5% ped aside as the ODS leader in March after making threshold for parliamentary seats (CSSD, ODS, TOP 09, controversial statements about Jews and homosexuals. Petr Necas, the party’s deputy chairman, replaced him. KSCM, VV), while another 5 parties received between 1% The primary issues in the election campaign were the and 5% of the vote. The remaining 17 parties each garnered Czech economy and the desire not to wind up in the same less than 1% support. economic straits as Greece. The parties emphasized The results for 2010 compared to 2006 illustrate greater reducing the public debt and deficit. Consistent with their equalization of party strength. The two strongest parties throughout the post-communist period, the ODS and the ideological positions, the ODS proposed reducing expenses through cuts in unemployment and pension benefits, while CSSD, saw their support levels drop substantially. As seen in ’ the CSSD advocated for increasing revenues in order to Table 1, the ODS s vote share dropped just over 15 percentage points from 35.4% in 2006 to 20.2% in 2010, and protect social programs. The platform of TOP 09 stressed balancing the budget through budget cuts, introducing the CSSD experienced a 10 percentage point drop from university tuition, and health care co-payments. 32.3% to 22.1%. Together, these two parties received 1.4 million fewer votes in 2010 than in 2006. Due to the cancellation of the early parliamentary elections, the prolonged election campaign (essentially Most observers expected the CSSD to do much better August 2009–May 2010) was the most expensive in Czech than it actually did. Opinion polls suggested the party 8– history. The CSSD spent the largest sum, estimating that it would win around 30% of the vote a marked difference fi spent 200 million Czech Crowns (Kc), though unofficial from the 22% it received.
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