Mass abstentions in Czech elections By Ken Biggs (Peoples Weekly World) Only one voter in five turned out on Nov. 19 for the second and final round of elections to the Senate, the upper house of the Czech Republic's Parliament, where a third of the 81 seats were being contested. The turnout was even lower than the previous Sunday, when two-thirds of the voters stayed away from the first round of the Senate elections and also from the first statewide elections to 13 newly created regional councils, which were held on the same day. The low turnout is a measure of the lack of confidence of the Czech people in their country's post-1989 bourgeois "democratic" institutions. As Vaclav Vertelar wrote in the Communist Party's daily Halo noviny: "Citizens are not interested in jokey but vacuous election slogans. They want a concrete, accountable programme which will create more jobs, give them rising real incomes, homes they can afford, good-quality health care and their children an education, fight crime, prevent banks and savings institutions from ripping them off, etc." Most Czechs, added Vertelar, regard the Senate as a luxury they can ill afford, and they are unconvinced about the contribution the new regional councils can make to solving their problems. The low turnout was also a slap in the face for ex-premier Vaclav Klaus's right-wing Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and the 4-Party Coalition (an electoral alliance of four smaller parties: the right-wing fundamentalist Freedom Union, Democratic Union and Civic Democratic Association and the centre-right Christian Democrats). Previously bitter enemies (because of the ODS's "tolerance" of the Czech Republic's minority Social Democratic government), the Coalition and the ODS buried their hatchets and joined forces after the first round of the Senate elections on Nov. 12 in an attempt to stampede voters with a "red scare," following the unexpected success of the Czech Communist Party (KSCM) in getting eight of its candidates through to last Sunday's second round. But, as the low turnout showed, the "red threat" ploy failed miserably, indicating that, while the right are stepping up their attacks on the Communists, the appeal of anti-communism is wearing thin, as the Czech people experience the full fruits of the restoration of capitalism after 1989: a possible third economic crisis (as evidenced by the dramatic increase in the country's foreign trade deficit and rising inflation), mass unemployment in key industrial areas in North Bohemia and North Moravia, widespread job insecurity, and IMF/World Bank/EU-ordered cuts in public spending. The Communists' success in the first round of the Senate elections was in many ways an even more remarkable achievement than their success in the elections to the new regional councils, where they won 21 percent of the vote (compared with 11 percent at the 1998 general election) and 23.8 percent of the 675 seats. This is because, in contrast to the proportional representation system used in the regional elections, the elections to the Senate were decided on the basis of a modified version of the single-member constituency, first-past-the-post system, a system designed to favor the two largest parties in the lower house (the Chamber of Deputies), currently the allied Social Democrats and ODS. However, none of the Communist Party's eight candidates in the second round won, and the only retiring Communist senator lost his seat, leaving the party with just three seats in the upper house. The main reason for this was that, while the right was able to unite against the "red threat," the Social Democrats again refused to work with the Communists in a full-blown national alliance against the right. A second factor was the refusal of many Communist voters to follow the advice of the party's district committee to vote Social Democrat in the second round because of the reactionary record of the SocDem candidate. This applied in particular to the Prostejov constituency, where Czech Foreign Secretary Jan Kavan a NATO and EU enthusiast lost his seat. _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
