Czechia - 2013 Parliamentary Election
On 17 June 2013 Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas said he was resigning over a corruption and spying scandal that had rocked the small European Union nation. Police raided government and private offices, seizing up to $8 million in cash, large amounts of gold and documents. Jana Nagyova, office manager and mistress of then-prime minister Petr Necas, was accused of bribing representatives, working with mafia-like lobbyists and shadowing the then-wife of the prime minister with the help of the secret service. Czech President Milos Zeman said the charges, brought after armed police raids on government and private offices, were "serious."
The standard practice would have been for parliamentary president Miroslava Nemcova to have appointed a new cabinet. That, at least, was what the majority in parliament wanted, and President Milos Zeman could have gone along with that. The ruling coalition was set to elect a new leader to form a government. If approved by the country's president, the coalition could rule until elections in 2014.
But on 10 July 2013 Czech President Milos Zeman swore in a cabinet that faced almost certain rejection by parties in parliament, raising the prospect of prolonged political uncertainty. Left-wing populist President Milos Zeman seemed intent on transforming the Czech Republic from a parliamentary into a presidential democracy. As the first directly elected president of his country, Zeman said he could allow himself more powers than his predecessors.
The leftist president confirmed longtime ally economist Jiri Rusnok as prime minister, hoping that he could pull the Czech economy out of a recession in its second year and lead the country into an election due in 2014. But the cabinet was likely to lose a vote of confidence, due within 30 days, as Rusnok's appointment had infuriated both the three parties of the outgoing center-right coalition and the leftist opposition, who all viewed the appointment as a power grab by Zeman.
It is not often that Czech politicians find common ground on any given issue, but President Miloš Zeman’s first few months in office led politicians across the board to the conclusion that direct presidential elections may not have been such a good idea after all. As soon as Zeman took up office he made it clear that his mandate was stronger than that of any political party on the scene and that he intended to make full use of any powers the constitution gave him. The fact that the Czech Constitution is ambiguous on many points has made it easy for Zeman to stretch his powers to the limit and possibly even beyond. He was the first head of state to refuse to appoint a professor because he did not approve of his behaviour, he deadlocked the process of appointing new ambassadors by insisting on his own nominees and refusing to appoint others until they were approved by the foreign minister and, following the fall of the center-right government, he appointed a prime minister of his own choice who then proceeded to form a government of people known to be loyal to the head of state.
By August 2013 the Czech Republic had been stuck in a deep crisis for almost two months. On 07 August 2013 Parliament held a vote of confidence in the provisional cabinet led by Prime Minister Jiri Rusnok. The result was obvious from the start: the right-of-center parties which made up the former government coalition had already agreed to vote against Rusnok's government of technocrats which mainly consists of political allies of President Milos Zeman and was created against the will of the parliamentary majority. One hundred of the 193 representatives attending the session voted against Rusnok.
Three members of the assembly decided not to back their parties. Thus, while the left-leaning provisional government was not confirmed in office, there was no majority for a continuation of the previous center-right coalition either. Parliament was left to pick up the pieces. What started as a government crisis became a crisis of parliamentary democracy. The dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies opened the door to early elections, which, if polls were to be believed, would be welcomed by the majority of Czech voters exhausted by months of political crisis.
Right of center, the TOP 09 party assumed the lead while, the battered Civic Democrats launched an anonymous campaign under the slogan “vote for the right”. In view of extreme public discontent with the performance of the former center-right government, right wing parties had to abandon the traditional line of campaigning and are presenting themselves as defenders of democratic values against the increasingly autocratic rule of the president and the growing influence of the Communist Party. Left-of-centre, the Social Democrats, who were slated to win the elections, were fighting their own internal battle for unity against the influence of President Zeman’s supporters inside the party and the growing ambitions of the Citizens’ Rights Party-Zemanites who were seeking to win over Social Democrat and Communist Party voters.
For months public surveys slated the political left to come away the biggest winners, with the Social Democrats first and the Communists coming a possible third. A strong finish for the leftists could mean a return to power after six years for the Social Democrats and arguably a stronger role for the Communist Party, shunned after 1989 for failing to break with its past. The Communists could tacitly support a Social Democrat minority government and together with a left-dominated Senate and a president who once led the Social Democratic Party, the future could look very different. But with days left before a vote for the Czech lower house, the front-running Social Democrats seemed to be losing steam, with a slow but steady decline in their voter support. On top of that, an analysis of nine different election polls by the ppm factum agency questioned the party’s chances of forming a left-wing coalition after the election, mainly due to a sudden surge by the untested ANO party.
The Social Democratic Party won the 25 October 2013 general election, but failed to secure a decisive victory sought by party leader Bohuslav Sobotka. The party had hoped to gain one-third of the vote to form a stable minority government (governing with the tacit support of the Communists). But the Social Democrats secured only 20.4 percent of the votes, making it clear the party would seek talks with potential coalition partners (with the apparent exception of right-of-center TOP 09 and the Civic Democrats, two previous coalition parties). There is no guarantee, however, that Sobotka will get the nod from President Zeman to try to form the next government. The president made clear in the past that he would only choose a prime minister designate from the “winning party”, leading to speculation he could choose someone other than its leader, presumably from a more closely-aligned wing.
The upstart party ANO 2011, led by billionaire businessman-turned-politician Andrej Babiš, secured the most surprising result of the election this year. The party, running a highly-effective protest campaign, finished second with 18.6 percent of the vote, outpacing not only the Communists, who were third (with 14.9 percent), but also two of the parties from the former government, TOP 09 and the Civic Democrats. TOP 09, led by Karel Schwarzenberg, finished with 11.9 percent of the vote, and the Civic Democrats, led by Miroslava Nemcová, secured 7.7 percent.
This election also saw other major surprises, among them the success of a ‘second’ protest party, Dawn, led by Czech-Japanese businessman turned senator Tomio Okamura. Dawn, with what many pundits regard as a strongly populist message, made it into the Chamber of Deputies with 7 percent of the vote. The election also saw the successful return to the lower house of the Christian Democrats led by Pavel Belobrádek (6.8 percent), a long-established party that had failed to make it into the Chamber of Deputies last time.
Parties that failed to pass the five percent threshold included the Citizens’ Rights – Zemanites (supported by the current president) who secured only 1.5 percent of the vote. The Green Party, headed by Ondrej Liška, secured just 3.1 percent of the vote and the right-wing coalition Heads Up headed by Jana Bobošíková also finished well short of the five percent needed (0.42 percent).
The voting produced a fragmented lower house, with no clear coalition in sight. Moreover, several party leaders have ruled out cooperation with one another; if they maintain their position, commentators say, it would be literally impossible to form even a minority government with sufficient backing. Under the Czech Constitution, the president can pick a prime minister designate of his own choice. Traditionally, this was always the head of the party that topped the ballot. But Miloš Zeman has shown little respect for tradition since becoming the Czech Republic's first directly elected head of state, and much will depend on how he chose to proceed.
Czech Social Democrats won a slim victory in a parliamentary election on 26 October 2013, but faced a tough task forming a government after voter anger over sleaze and budget cuts propelled new protest parties into parliament. Bohuslav Sobotka's center-left, pro-European Social Democrats had 21 percent of the vote, well short of the 30 percent they had targeted and in need of more than one coalition partner to build a stable government.
Three months after general elections, the final obstacles on the path to the appointment of a new Czech government were cleared in January 2014. Just short of three months after the Social Democrats came first in general elections, obstacles on the path to the appointment of a coalition Czech prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotkahe put together with ANO and the Christian Democrats fell away one by one. President Miloš Zeman was willing to swallow his avowed misgivings about the abilities or backgrounds of several members of the proposed 17-seat cabinet. After weeks of sniping at them, there had been fears that Zeman would reject some candidates, potentially sparking a constitutional crisis. Some regarded a series of unprecedented meetings the president had been conducting with ministerial candidates as another baffling delaying tactic on the part of Zeman, and a concession to the first elected head of state.
Andrej Babiš' party was the clear favorite for the October 2017 general elections. Billionaire media mogul Andrej Babiš entered politics with his Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) party six years ago, he has won the 2014 European Parliament election, finished second in the country’s 2013 parliamentary election, and joined the coalition government as a deputy prime minister and finance minister.
Babiš and Zeman, who consistently adopted the position of representatives of the “honest citizens against the unfair elites.” What differs Babiš from Polish and Hungarian leaders is that he’s pragmatic.
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