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Communists mull other candidates

Party plots a stalemate to introduce new contenders

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 6th, 2008 issue

Unimpressed by the presidential platforms of incumbent Václav Klaus and his opponent, Jan Švejnar, the leaders of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) have selected a handful of their own potential candidates.
The party, which holds 29 out of the 281 electoral seats in Parliament, plans to support Švejnar in the first and second rounds of the Feb. 8 presidential elections, but only because it wants to lower Klaus’ chances of winning, KSČM Chairman Vojtěch Filip told the daily Hospodářské noviny Jan. 31.
In the third round, when the votes of the upper and lower houses are combined, the party will purposely refrain from endorsing any candidate, effectively increasing the chance of a stalemate that would allow for the nomination of a new candidate who will have a better chance of beating Klaus.
“The KSČM won’t let Kaus versus Klaus enter the second and third rounds of the election,” Filip said. “It is already certain that [honorary ODS member] Klaus will win in the Senate, where the ODS has 41 seats. It is therefore our responsibility to … enable a different candidate to win in the Chamber of Deputies.”
While declining to name all of the party’s potential presidential nominees until the eve of the election, Filip released the names of four local luminaries currently under consideration.
The first, Jiří Dienstbier, is a former foreign affairs minister, political dissident and one of Klaus’ harshest critics. Another, Václav Pačes, is an internationally renowned molecular genetics professor and the president of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Before officially backing Švejnar at the end of last year, the opposition Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) also considered nominating both Pačes and Dienstbier.
Although their names have not been the subjects of political discussions in recent months, Filip said the remaining potential candidates, Constitutional Court Justice Pavel Rychetský and nuclear physicist František Janouch, enjoy popularity among the KSČM’s leadership. Despite their co-founding of Charter 77, a Cold War-era document that criticized the human rights violations committed by the KSČM’s predecessor, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Filip said KSČM voters would support Janouch or Rychetský because they “criticized the regime from a leftist point of view.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com


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