Outside looking in

The campaign for the May 28-29 election has shaken up Czech politics, and not all the changes were necessarily good ones for a country still seeking to solidify its position as a mature European democracy. As usual, the media have played and continue to play a major role in shaping the campaign. The public broadcasters, in particular, need to rethink their role in shaping debate if they are to truly serve the public and contribute to a well-structured democratic environment.

Jiří Paroubek's decision to boycott several leading newspapers was just one example of the strained relationship between the media and politics. It is true that many journalists do not cover Paroubek in a favorable way and have a visceral response to the Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) leader. That seems to result from a combination of two factors. The first is Paroubek's arrogance, a personality trait that comes across even more strongly than it did in another of the country's arrogant leaders, Mirek Topolánek. The second, though, comes from the journalists, most of whom are now in their 30s and 40s and matured in the 1990s developing a deeply engrained "left is bad" instinct. Paroubek's personal style certainly fails to convince them that this could be otherwise.

In the midterm, however, this dynamic plays into Paroubek's hands. He likes that the media accept the ČSSD's and the Civic Democrats' (ODS) game of a bipolar left-right competition. This comes despite the fact that the Czech political system is traditionally multipolar, with various ideologies and about half a dozen relevant parties competing against each other.

During the 2006 elections, the two major parties drew a record number of voters - after the most vicious negative campaigning in history - and Czech Television aired the first-ever televised debate between two "prime minister candidates" from the ODS and the ČSSD. This year's negative campaigning and the media portrayal of a bipolar competition are similar, even if the political environment is somewhat different.

The ODS would also like to encourage and benefit from this image, but the changed landscape makes this more difficult. The center-right has been fragmented between the ODS and TOP 09 - and perhaps Public Affairs (VV) - with TOP 09 closing in on the ODS in some opinion polls. Nonetheless, again this year, Czech Television (and before it the privately owned TV Prima) will hold a similar ČSSD-ODS two-way debate on the eve of the election.

It was astonishing to see that, while commercially owned print media did at least attempt to provide coverage of all the relevant parties, Czech Television, despite offering space to smaller parties on minor talk shows on the ČT24 news channel, took steps that alter the nature of the race. Czech Television and Czech Radio have effectively shut out two parliamentary parties, the Greens and the Christian Democrats, from their series of debates among regional party leaders. They did so ostensibly with regard to opinion polls they had commissioned, in which these two parties usually fared just below the 5 percent election threshold, disregarding completely the fact that their opinion polls had a 2 percent margin of error. Interpreting this as inviting only parties that have a chance of entering Parliament is an egregious error - both in terms of social science methodology and in terms of public service.

Another shameful development was Czech Television effectively allowing debates to take on the atmosphere of soccer games. In future instances, Czech Television must ask the public to remain silent during debates, as is common in the Anglo-Saxon world. (After all, Václav Moravec, the host of the final debate, likes to claim Anglo-Saxon inspirations, alluding to his BBC Czech past.) Many in the debate audiences sport party-affiliated T-shirts, another un-civic element that must be prevented in the future.

The state-owned media thus did much to push the Czech Republic away from a standard European political environment, both in terms of the quality of the debate and the impact on the party political system.

Four years ago, the Green Party's success completed the development of the Czech political system into a standard European model, with Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Greens and the far-left all present. (The conspicuous absence in the Czech case is liberals, which may be partially explained by the peculiar nature of the self-proclaimed "conservative-liberal" ODS.)

This year, the situation has changed. The Greens and the Christian Democrats will quite possibly drop out of the lower house of Parliament, which will mean problems for their long-term sustainability, both in terms of media visibility and public subsidies. In their stead, we have two start-up parties with less-than-clear ideological frameworks. TOP 09 does seem to be a fairly clear-cut conservative option (though the political leanings of its chairman, Karel Schwarzenberg, are less clear), which begets the question of its long-term sustainability next to the ODS. VV is still a vague and enigmatic organization riding a populist wave. Smaller center-right parties have come and gone in Czech politics over the past decades and usually only survive one or two election cycles as relevant parties. The difference this time is that there are two groups simultaneously playing this role. While TOP 09 has made public debt its prime issue, VV remains an unpredictable force. Traditional media have not done enough to dissect that.

Social media campaigns, meanwhile, are a new feature of this campaign. Their impact can only be truly assessed when the election is over, but the impact is likely to be minimal. Political parties have not yet developed an effective way to communicate across these emerging media, and most of the grass-roots startup ideas to "cleanse politics" showed good intentions but lacked a clear vision.

"Defenestration 2010," which asked voters to circle bottom-of-the-list candidates with their preferential votes, was always doomed to fail with the more loyal voters of the major parties and is counter-intuitive to supporters of the smaller parties. In "Exchange Politicians," leading artists echoed the public's discontent with politicians but also failed to propose positive answers or, for that matter, clear alternatives. The Greens tried to also use prominent artists' endorsements in YouTube videos, and while those featured in the ads came from the creative arts, the videos lacked creativity.

The biggest hit among social media campaigns, "Přemluv bábu," a rip-off of American comedienne Sarah Silverman's "Great Schlep" video, demonstrated the same old instinctive dislike of the left (while the video targeted young adults, its director, Petr Zelenka, is in his 40s), but failed to copy Silverman's absurd sense of humor and plant it in a Czech context.

So, as the new media mirrored the frustration and confusion among the public, traditional media failed to live up to their role of promoting structured civic debate on policy. Public broadcasters especially need to rethink their pre-election programming if they want to avoid accusations of serving the two major parties that control their boards.

As the public continues looking for political alternatives, media continue to provide little help.

- The author is a political and media analyst. He works at Respekt Institut, a think-tank affiliated with the weekly magazine Respekt.

Petr Kutílek can be reached at
features@praguepost.com