Election Watch: Social Dems up in arms

If it's campaign season, it must be scandal season, but unfortunately the public seems unable to differentiate between real and manufactured disrepute.

In a story first broken by the news server Aktuálně.cz, the Social Democrats (ČSSD) have accepted the largest donation in Czech political history - 13 million Kč - from an arms dealer. And not only was their financier, Austrian Tomas Melich, an arms dealer, but apparently he is one without moral scruples (if there is any other kind), who sold weapons to the former Czechoslovak communist regime.

Melich's communist regime dealings were detailed in the archives of the embattled Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) and, rather than react to the actual substance of the report, ČSSD leader Jiří Paroubek instead accused the ÚSTR of being biased against his party in the lead-up to May's election.

This despicable tactic would be all the worse if only it weren't so successful. ČSSD has suffered virtually no harm in public opinion polls and Paroubek managed to divert all attention from the fact that his party is now beholden to a foreign arms dealer. Paroubek also then demanded that the ÚSTR release the archive documents to his party, overlooking that the archives are public and accessible if only somebody from his party took the time to go to the institute and fill out the necessary forms.

"This is a very serious matter," says political analyst Bohumil Doležal, a former adviser to President Václav Klaus when he was prime minister. "I only fear the Czech public is not very sensitive in these matters. People do not register this; they are accustomed to the fact that election campaigns consist of throwing dirt at each other."

In a twist that would make Kafka proud, when the ÚSTR provided the archive documents (which once again are public) to the Social Democrats, Petr Nečas, the leader of the rival Civic Democrats (ODS), then accused the institute of bias against his party. If the institute is biased against everybody, doesn't that make them more reliable than either Nečas or Paroubek?

The ODS, on its way to being trounced in May, somehow thought accusing the institute of bias was more important than focusing on what is an unbelievable revelation: Their rival party is not only being financed by foreign entities, but just to repeat this one more time, an arms dealer. Perhaps a crack dealer or child molester would have warranted an actual response.

In another bit of incompetent political maneuvering, the ODS purged the leadership of its Prague chapter. Prague 5 Mayor Milan Jančík - who has been implicated in numerous scandals including the fake law degree controversy at a Plzeň university - was dismissed as the chapter's deputy chairman. On paper, that seems a good idea, until the party replaced him with Rudolf Blažek, the Prague deputy mayor in charge of the 888 million Kč OpenCard project that was rife with irregularities and kickbacks to still largely anonymous parties.

"The changes in the Prague ODS are more or less cosmetic," Doležal says. "The ODS will end up terribly in the elections and then the real earthquake will take place."

By then, the ČSSD will be safely in office and no doubt on its way to securing lots of much-needed Austrian arms.

"The most likely election result is a minority ČSSD government with the support of the Communists," Doležal says.

It seems Mr. Melich knows how to spend his money wisely.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com