When populists win in Prague, this is not particularly “Eastern European”. It’s the new normal for the Western world Timothy Garton Ash
IIf you open your window on a quiet street in central Prague, the first sound you hear is the sound of suitcases rolling across paving stones, as tourists walk to their hotel or Airbnb. (It was the Czech capital 8 million visitors last year). As they wander around Prague Castle and fill the Old Town’s bars with cheerful chatter, these visitors – many of whom may be unaware of the recent electoral victory of right-wing nationalist populist parties – may imagine that this is just another ordinary European country. And you know what: they’ll be right.
Some of the more informed newspaper commentators, who reach an attention-grabbing generalization, tell a different story. This is Eastern Europe Back to typeThey say. After Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, it’s now the Czech Republic too! The truth is more interesting – and more disturbing.
Thirty-six years ago, during the Velvet Revolution in the fall of 1989, people in Prague kept telling me that they just wanted their country to be a “normal” country. Normally, they meant something like (West) Germany, France, Britain, Spain, or Italy. Well, now it is. Normal life has changed in the meantime. At that time, the dominant Western normal was liberal, internationalist and pro-European. It is now increasingly anti-liberal, nationalistic and Eurosceptic. In the Czech election campaign, current Prime Minister Petr Fiala tried to mobilize Czech voters by asking the question: “Do we want to move east or west?” . But what does this mean, when the West is US President Donald Trump, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, not to mention the Reform Party in the United Kingdom led by Nigel Farage, the AfD in Germany, and the National Rally in France, all of whom are currently topping the opinion polls?
The likely next prime minister, Andrej Babis, leader of the election-winning Anu (Yes) party, is a billionaire businessman who has used his vast fortune to carve out a remarkable political career. He was already prime minister from 2017 to 2021. Troubled by legal proceedings over past corrupt dealings, he is not a man of deep ideological convictions, but rather an “adventurous populist” who goes where the votes are. Do I remind you of someone? Maybe Silvio Berlusconi in Italy? Or Trump.
Even more extreme are the smaller parties set to be coalition partners: the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy Party, led by the half-Japanese Czech nationalist Tomio Okamura, and the eccentrically named Bikers for Themselves party. The motorists suggested to the Secretary of State a former racing driver called Philippe Turek who had a particularly objectionable past record, including apparently being photographed racing. Nazi salute From the car window. This is terrible. But the country’s president, Peter Pavel, has the constitutional power to block his nomination. And how abnormal is all of this really when the standard for normalcy is businessman Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, lecturing 800 senior US military commanders on the importance of doing push-ups and shaving your beard?
France has historically been the country most inclined to look down on the eastern half of Europe, through what I call intra-European Orientalism. But even in light of oddball figures like Okamura and Turek, Czech politics is a model of democratic stability compared to French politics today. Babis can seem like a serious leader compared to comic figures such as the recent British Prime Minister Liz Truss.
If we dig a little deeper, we find further evidence of a pan-European admixture. Thanks to remarkable economic growth since the end of communism, the Czechs now have a high per capita GDP Measured by purchasing power parityIt is the fourteenth largest country in the European Union, ahead of Spain and Portugal. The Czech Republic has Lowest share Of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the European Union and one of Lowest unemployment rates. On other indicators, e.g Higher educationIt is of lower quality.
Thanks to the legacy of two great presidents, Tomasz Garrigue Masaryk, the founding president of Czechoslovakia after World War I, and Vaclav Havel, the founding president of the Czech Republic after the Cold War, it has pluralistic democratic institutions that are fairly strong by today’s Western standards. They include a Senate that will not be controlled by the incoming populists; an independent constitutional court and a national audit office; The public television and radio service remains widely respected. They will be threatened by the populists in power, but an active civil society and the country’s president will defend them. If we could say the same for the United States.
Of course, history is important. There remain some notable regional similarities dating back to 40 years of Soviet domination and communist rule until 1989. But increasingly, it is the legacy of pre-communist history and pre-1914 empires that matters most. Taking positions towards the war in Ukraine. People happily generalize that Eastern Europe is more pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian than Western Europe. In fact, it is north– Eastern European countries such as Poland and the Baltic countries View this positionBut so do other northern Europeans, such as the Finns and Swedes, who have long experience dealing with Russian imperialism. In contrast, countries in southEastern Europe, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, with their heritage of Orthodox Christianity and Ottoman rule, tends to be softer toward Russia and less supportive of Ukraine. In this regard, they have much in common with other southern European countries Like Greece Than they do with Estonia or Denmark for example. Again, it’s a pan-European mixture.
Don’t get me wrong. The Czech Republic’s shift to the right is a real cause for concern, especially for Ukraine. Thanks to the initiative of President Pavel, a former NATO general, the country led a remarkable scheme to coordinate European purchases of ammunition for Ukraine, anywhere in the world where ammunition could be found. Last year, it sent 1.5 million bullets to Kyiv and aims to supply them 1.8 m By the end of 2025. This is by far the bulk of Europe’s vital munitions supplies to Ukraine. Now Babis says Someone else has to take it.
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More broadly, a potential new Czech government would reinforce the populist, anti-liberal nationalist trend across Europe and forces in Brussels that oppose the EU’s Green Deal, the Migration and Asylum Pact, and almost any other integration steps. The motorists’ backseat driver is veteran Eurosceptic Vaclav Klaus. Both Ano and the motorists’ movement belong to the Patriots for Europe group, along with the Austrian Freedom Party, Spain’s Vox, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
So, let’s not stop at regional generalizations. Each European country has special features and strong common features. The real challenge now is how to move beyond this reactionary new normal to a new horizon new The new normal, which will certainly be different than it was in the 1990s and 2000s. The message we must carry in our intellectual bags from the glorious city of Masaryk and Havel is that, across Europe and the entire Western democratic world, we face common problems and must seek common solutions.