Postview: Change has got to come from the voters

We are somewhat reluctant to openly endorse a candidate or party to lead Prague City Hall but at the very least can clearly say who shouldn't be in charge: the Civic Democrats (ODS).

If for no other reason, a victory by the ODS would be a sign that voters just simply haven't been paying attention in recent years to the myriad scandals involving public contracts - from the spending on an ill-fated bid for the Olympics to the continuing revelations about the botched OpenCard project. One need not even take into consideration the party's proposal for the "homeless camp," which is now repudiated by its own candidate for mayor.

In democracy, it is essential that corruption and incompetence be punished at the polls (if not by other means, as well). Failure to do so means that graft by public officials ceases to be the responsibility of the officials themselves but is rather the fault of voters who have given tenuous support to these practices by re-electing the very same people who committed them.  

We conducted interviews with the mayoral candidates from the four parties most likely to win significant seats in the city assembly. Three of them were happy to meet our reporters in person. One wasn't: the ODS candidate.

This was unlikely a personal decision by the party's candidate, Bohuslav Svoboda, but rather is indicative of a political party so firmly entrenched in power that it no longer knows up from down, right from wrong. The situation, in fact, mimicked nearly exactly what happened in the lead-up to May's general election.

Upon leaving a meeting with TOP 09's candidate, Zdeněk Tůma, party officials were all too anxious to ask us to remind our many non-native Czech readers that European Union citizens who reside here permanently are eligible to vote.

The ODS either isn't interested in those votes or doesn't know the law and that tens of thousands of people who fit in that demographic are people whose concerns they should also be addressing. Either way, it's one more sign they are a political party currently unfit for leading a modern European capital city.