Central Europe Activ

After the last general elections in Poland, and more recently in Hungary, a new political landscape emerged. Yesterday the Czech Republic has joined the wave a change, ending an almost 20-years-long stalemate with two new parties.

The proportional voting system propelled five parties into the lower house of the national assembly. The first two are the two parties that have been the major forces in government in the transition period and largely responsible for the fact that the Czech Republic is closely contesting Belgium’s caretaker government legacy. However, the CSSD, which was the first major left-wing party in Central Europe that has no roots in the Soviet-era, and its erstwhile may rival, ODS, a former political home of the infamous Vaclav Klaus, collected a mere 42% of the votes in total.

They were closely followed by a new Conservative/Liberal party, Tradition Responsibility Prosperity 09 (TOP0)) with 16.7% of the national vote and carrying Prague under the leadership of the former Foreign Minister and the 11th Prince of Schwarzenberg. Another new right wing party, the direct-democracy proponent V?ci ve?ejné (Public Affairs), a party that has a potential in the sometimes surrealistic Czech politics to be the force of daily surprise. An ODS-TOP09-VV is a very likely coalition that may carry 58% of the seats in the Lower House, thus creating the strongest every majority in the very evenly divided Czech legislation.

The former Communists have still got what they always get, a 11.27% of the vote that gave them back their original 26 seats. Two parties, the old Christian Democratic Party (KDU-?SL) and the Greens were ejected from the legislation.

Poland has started to consolidate its transitional party system, shun its former Communists and produce a stable government in 2007. Hungary followed in 2010, although with an alarming strengths given to a radical right wing group, dropping two old parties, cutting back the heirs of the formal Communist Party and letting two new parties in the system. It remains to be seen if Slovakia can improve its political system with ejecting its racists party and allowing at least one rational new one into the arena in two weeks time.

Link: New parties ‘re-write’ Czech political map

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  1. Thanks Christophe – I had little time in the past months and not enough travel in the region, I hope the blog will come back. The article is good – I am really waiting what will happen in Slovakia, that political system would need a really big shake up and it just might happen.

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