Death of the Dinosaurs

Yesterday the results of the general elections in the Czech Republic have been announced. These elections have led to some bizarre results to anyone who is familiar to the political landscape. However the message from the elections is one that every nation should carefully study.

The run-up to the elections has been unorthodoxly too long. The campaign started last summer, with the vision of having early elections in October. This was due to the fall of the previous center-right government (during the presidency of the EU, you might remember). Thus a technocratic government of experts was put together to last till the early elections in October. However, since holding the elections this late after the fall of the government were unconstitutional the Constitutional Court has held that the elections need to be held at their proper date. And so the campaigning continued…

The election results that were announced are as follows: Social Democracts 22.1%, Citizens Democratic Party (a  center-right party) 20.2%, TOP 09 (center-right, conservative) 16.7%, Communists 11.4%, ‘Public Things’(centrist) 10.9%. Don’t let all the strange names fool you. The percentages and the parties as such are not important. What is important is that following the announcement of the results four party leaders resigned their positions. First of these was the leader of the oldest party in the Czech republic, the Christian Democrats-People’s Party, which did not cross the 5% threshold for entering the parliament for the first time since the fall of communism. Second was the former Prime Minister from 1998-2002 Milos Zeman, whose new party also did not cross the 5% threshold. Last of the leaders of the parties who did get into the parliament was the leader of the Green Party.

However the resignation did not end there. The leader of the Social Democrats, the winning party in the elections, has resigned his position due to the fact that his style of politics has ruled out the Social Democrats from any coalition by the other parties apart from the Communist Party. This would be possible were the Social Democrats to get 30% or 35%, which they looked likely to get in the polls prior to the elections. The heads were also rolling in the the Citizens Democratic Party which lost the constituency of Prague for the first time ever since the fall of communism to TOP 09, with the head of the Prague branch resigning.

So to recap, we have 5 prominent politicians resigning after one election. One also has to take into consideration the resignation of the leader of Citizens Democrats two months prior to the elections and only 85 MPs out total of 200 retaining their seats. Some high ranking politicians were rejected by the people who put preferential votes behind new candidates and thus completely redid the lists that the parties submitted for elections. And of course it has to be pointed out that both TOP 09 and ‘Public Things’ are brand new parties, formed only about a year ago. Thus out of the 5 parties in in the parliament only the Communist have retained their leader.

It is fascinating to think how the will of the people has managed to transform the landscape of Czech politics during one elections. The people sent a clear message to let the parties and politicians. For the first time in quite a while the voice of the people has clearly been voiced and listened to by the politicians. What begins now is a new age in the Czech politics. The people now know when they feel frustration and anger at the political establishment they can actually go and do something about it. This goes against the age-old frustration of the people who feel that they have no one to vote for, or that they cannot change anything.

The new list system that is being used in Czech republic and Slovakia, where the people can put preferential votes behind their candidate who can then skip ahead of the ‘queue’, thus not letting some prominent politicians who the people do not trust has allowed for a new age to begin. An age after the death of the political dinosaurs.

Good Neighbors

The world nowadays, under international law, should strive to be one of good connections and friendships between states. Especially in Europe the idea of co-operation and friendship has lead to a great many organisations being set up to ensure these goals are achieved (the EU, the Council of Europe and OSCE to name a few). That is why it is particularly worrying to see two member states of these various European institutions treating each other with hostility. And this has certainly been the case with regards to Hungary and Slovakia.

There’s no need to go into the history of the relations between the two countries. It is sufficient to say that since Slovakia’s independence in 1993 the relations were tense. A turnaround came after 1998, when a party representing the Hungarian minority in Slovakia was one of the parties in the new coalition government. However since 2006 the relations have dropped steadily, eversince the nationalist party and the populist social democrats got into power in Slovakia. To add the the already bad situation in Hungary the opposition party FIDESZ saw this as a way to gaining mass support against the weak socialist government in Hungary and so began to spread nationalist populism, just like the two governing  in Slovakia. Over the four years of this carry on many incidents occurred, such as not allowing the Hungarian President to enter Slovakia to celebrate with the Hungarian minority because of the alleged failure of the Hungarian diplomatic service to give sufficient prior notification (2 weeks, apparently was not sufficient).

The history only shows how bad the situation is. However, it seems to be getting worse again. The newly elected FIDESZ government plans to pass a bill allowing a dual-citizenship for anyone who had Hungarian ancestors at any point in their family tree. Thus, all of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Slovakia could ask for this dual-citizenship. However this is not through anything like naturalization or marriage but simply because of ancestry. The bill provides for a few more perks with regard to the dual-citizenship, but there is no need to get into them.

The Slovak government opposes this, quite vehemently. In fact it plans to call the parliament to meet to discuss counter-measures. One of the proposed ones on the table is even to make any Slovak citizen who applies for citizenship of another country lose his/hers Slovak citizenship, another proposal is to limit this to just applying for the Hungarian citizenship. Either of the two proposals is, however, fundamentally flawed. If the former is adopted it effectively means an end to dual citizenships for Slovak citizens (and I wonder what knock-on effect it would have on the EU citizenship, which all EU country citizens hold as well as their country’s citizenship). If, on the other hand, the latter is adopted this would be an unjust discrimination and a court case should, hopefully, follow.

We can thus see two extremes on both sides. But how is one to remedy this situation? The answer to that question is very hard to figure out. At this point the conflict is not only between the populist parties on both sides of the border. In Hungary the opposition is also backing the controversial bill, while in Slovakia the opposition tried to make themselves look better by offering to enter negotiations with FIDESZ under the guidance of the the European People’s Party.

The reason behind this are the elections. While in Hungary the elections took place not even a month ago in Slovakia the elections are set to take place in two weeks time. Thus the parties on both sides, knowing that drastic public finance cuts will need to be made soon to make the the public finances stable yet again, try to simply overshadow this forcing out a problem like this and the voters, full of anger from the job losses and pay cuts believe every bit of hatred the parties spread.

So yet again we can ask ourselves how to solve this situation? It’s simple really, once people stop believing, politician’s will stop playing.

The EU help

Over the past few weeks we have heard about the EU trying its best to stabilize the situation caused by unsustainable borrowing and debt of its member states. However when one thinks back to February the EU was desperately trying to figure out a way to help Greece and make sure its situation is never again repeated in the EU. Even after 3 months of negotiations all we managed to get is the European Stabilization Pact and a mechanism for the ECB to be printing money out of thin air.

However this Pact cannot mean the end of all the problems. Even the markets saw this as their early optimism has faded and now the euro continues to fall again. Thus the minister meet again in Brussels, with Germany leading the agenda,  to discuss other proposals to address the reasons for the situation we find ourselves in. According to the commentators we have a few different proposals on the table.

The most controversial one comes from the European Commission and it deals with the European ministers scrutising the budget of eurozone member states before the national parliaments. In effect this is giving over of the sovereign budgetary powers to Brussels. It sounds very populist to sum it up like this, but it’s the easiest way. However, this populist undertone has already been used by many opposition parties in the eurozone countries to gain a few percentage points in the polls. When one is to examine the proposal, however, it makes a lot of sense. It effectively finally gives the Commission and the Council a way to make sure the Maastricht criteria are enforceable and that no country will ever step over those.

The second proposal is to cut the European Funding to any country that crosses over the the limit of the Maastricht Treaty. This proposal is quite nice in the way that it creates an effective way to punish the ‘wrongdoers’, so to say, without infringing the national sovereignty. But, as always, there is a catch. the EU funds are usually used by the smaller and lesser developed countries, whereas the net contributors to the EU such as Germany or France(i.e. the bigger and more developed countries) do not benefit a lot from these funds. Thus if a country from the latter category breaks the Maastricth criteria, yet again the EU is left toothless.

The third proposal, one backed by Angela Merkel, is to reach a consensus from all the countries to put an amendment to the constitution of each eurozone member that would ensure a 3% deficit to be the maximum. In effect, putting the Maastricht criteria on constitutional status. This yet again enforces the criteria without infringing the national sovereignty. However this enforcement is done through the highest courts in the respective country and they may have a differing tradition in ruling against the state. For example the German Constitutional Court is very active in enforcing the constitution even if it means judicial policy making for the state. On the other hand we have courts that are very reluctant to give an order regarding the public spending (for example the Irish Supreme Court). Even if this barrier was overcome, though, one might question such a proposal. In the hierarchy of law, the EU law is at the highest level, with the Treaties being the highest level of EU law. As such it can be argued that the Maastricht criteria can be enforced by the courts. So far, however, this has not been even considered or tried. If we were to make such a constitutional amendment, it would seriously undermined the status of EU law.

Thus we have 3 differing proposals to try and remedy the reasons behind the current situation. Each of them has its own drawbacks and pluses. This author would prefer the first, if only because of closer European integration, as well as the flaws of the other two proposals being simple too great to prevent this situation from reoccurring again. However, it does not matter which one is picked as one thing is certain: the EU help that comes with these 3 proposals creates a definite two tier Europe of the EU and the closer integrated eurozone- something that might go against the Lisbon strategy of unifying all of Europe.