Havel's endorsement boosts Greens

Spending the past months in turmoil, and with intra-party rivalry helping foment the fall of Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek's government, the Green Party (SZ) has received a ringing endorsement from Václav Havel that party leaders hope will help steady the ship on the eve of European elections.

"Under the leadership of Martin Bursík, this party was able to achieve a number of productive changes to the government, even more than their supporters could have hoped for," Havel wrote in an e-mail to The Prague Post explaining his backing of the party.

Though Havel is often mum on domestic politics, he has become more outspoken in recent weeks, and few are surprised at his party preference.

"I was surprised that he waited so long. His support for Bursík and the Green Party is blatant," said political analyst Bohumil Doležal.

"The question is will it help them?" said Vladimíra Dvořáková, a political scientist at the University of Economics in Prague.

In a poll completed in early May, the STEM polling agency found that 3 percent of voters supported the Green Party for the June 5-6 European Parliamentary (EP) elections, trailing the Social Democrats (ČSSD) at 24 percent and Civic Democrats (ODS) at 21 percent, among others. The poll was completed before Havel's endorsement.

A similar survey tracking general party preference found the Greens receiving 5.3 percent support, which would surpass the 5 percent threshold required to make it into the both the EP and, during this fall's elections, the Czech Parliament. Green deputies received 6.3 percent support in the last domestic elections.

"We will get above 5 percent," says Green Party Deputy Kateřina Jacques. "When it gets to the actual elections, people will realize that we are a pro-European, pro-Lisbon Treaty party and that we can show them a better solution to the economic crisis."

Doležal is skeptical of Havel's endorsement boosting Green prospects.

"It will attract new voters, but we'll see whether it will be enough," he said. "The party gradually decomposed during its parliamentary existence."

In March, the Greens, then key members of the three-party governing coalition, kicked two deputies - Olga Zubová and Věra Jakubková - out of the party. Within a week, the pair voted against Topolánek's government in the no-confidence vote that proved its downfall. Both Zubová and Jakubková are leaders in a new party, the Democratic Greens.

At the time, Doležal said the demise of the Green Party was imminent. "I'd be a bit more careful now," he said.

For his part, Havel made sure to clarify that he supports the party led by Bursík. "After the election of [President Václav Klaus] and the overthrowing of the Topolánek government, I don't have trust in the deputies of the Democratic Greens," he said.

A separate question altogether is whether Czech voters care about the EP elections at all. Turnout in the Czech Republic was 28 percent in the 2004 EP elections, and a Eurobarometer poll predicts the Continent-wide turnout for this year's will be 34 percent, down 12 percent.

Greens were the first to form a European-level party, the European Greens, in 2004. Other political parties have formed similar Continental federations since. The European Greens hold 35 of 785 seats in the present EP, though none from the Czech Republic.

"They are the only small party in the European Parliament with something to say. They are listened to especially when it comes to energy or the environment," said Piotr Maciej Kaczyński with the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. "It would be a major breakthrough, as the first from the new member states, if the Czech Greens were able to get into Parliament."

European-wide trends are hard to generalize, but in some countries voters seem to be coalescing around parties outside the traditional mainstream.

A poll published May 23 in The Guardian indicated 25 percent of voters in EP elections were to support parties other than the United Kingdom's two major parties. In France, around 40 percent of voters are expected to back parties not considered major players domestically.

There are 33 parties on the Czech EP ballot. "People vote for parties they wouldn't want representing them at home," Dvořáková said.

Whether such trends are likely to lead to more votes for the Czech Greens remains to be seen. "Voters are disillusioned in general, and also disillusioned with the alternatives," Doležal said. "I don't believe that people would vote for the Greens instead of the ČSSD or ODS, en masse that is."

Being a mass party is not what is expected of the Greens, nor is it why he endorsed them, Havel said. "The Greens will probably never become a large mainstream party. ? They should oppose the technocratic methods of the government, be it from within a coalition or from the opposition."

- Sarah Borufka and Martina Čermáková contributed to this report.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com