It just might be. [Last week, witnesses claimed that Vondruška was one of the former prison guards who beat political prisoners under the pre-1989 regime]. Why should a former communist guard consider his past to be bad? The problem is that the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) thinks that Vondruška, its member, is good.

But why shouldn't the KSČM be proud of a prison guard when the party is proud of the former communist informer who leads it? With the KSČM's ego, it's actually one of the few remaining old communist parties in the world. Therefore, the KSČM shouldn't be surprised that the party's position in the political scene is embarrassing — it doesn't have coalition partners, nobody wants to cooperate with it, and it has no respect from the public.

Even an unhappy Jifií Paroubek, who thinks that the KSČM will help him to seize power for free, can't count on the KSČM ultimately. His own party members will force him not to do that in the same way the Christian Democratic Union (KDU-ČSL) did with Miroslav Kalousek. The KSČM represents extremism. The party has one thing to its credit: It has absorbed everything; other extremists are exceptionally weak.

The KSČM can stay isolated for years. The party always attracts a few voters. Or it will modernize. But where and with whom? And why, really?

Our election system remains proportional, which gives the opportunity to a higher number of political parties to get into the Chamber of Deputies, Jan Keller writes in Právo Sept. 8. The purpose of this system is to provide as many postelection combinations as possible.

The current leaders of the Green Party and the KDU-ČSL insist on a proportional system, but they don't understand how it works. As long as small political parties keep saying that they will form a government only with one of the competing big parties, the proportional system becomes pointless.

It's only a question of time until the leadership of big parties stop tolerating smaller parties. The Civic Democratic Party (ODS) doesn't need two obedient parties that play into its hands but can't manage to get even the tiniest the majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

Maybe the Greens and KDU-ČSL will achieve a big dream come true. Changing the election system to the benefit of the majority would most likely weaken the KSČM again. But the price would be that neither small party would get the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. If Martin Bursík's anti-communism is honest, he will pay the price. Miroslav Kalousek was right in his efforts to show an alternative to his party. However, he is not honest when he claims that he is proud of how his party finally decided.

No politician can be proud of being leader of a party that prefers collective suicide to the pain of rational thinking. Bursík counts on the Greens being somehow traditionally more proud of their emotions and stereotypes than of their good sense. Mother nature won't be shaken. She has bigger problems than Czech Greens.