A bad time to take a hiatus from blogging

OK, so your trusted correspondent has taken an unusually long break from blogging. (Trusted?) It could not possibly have come at a worse time. There have been quite a few particularly interesting developments, on everything from Yuval Levin's and David Brooks' head-of-the-nail hitting analyses on the omnipotence and omniscience (or lack thereof) of the state, to a boat carrying "humanitarian aid" to Hamas errr... the Gaza Strip (the Denver Post's David Harsanyi has a great column on "proportionality"), to your correspondent's recent experience at Sklípeček Republic. (It involved wine.)

In case you hadn't heard, there was an election here in Czech Republic last weekend. The Czech Social Democrats (ČSSD) won, with 22% of the vote and 56 out of 200 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Next were the more conservative parties of the Civic Democrats (ODS) and TOP 09, with 20% (53 seats) and 17% (41 seats) respectively. The Communists (KSČM) finished a relieving fourth place, with 11% and 26 seats, and Public Affairs (VV), a somewhat populist anti-debt party run by a former investigative journalist of the Current-Affair-era-Bill-O'Reilly type, rounded out the group, with 11% and 24 seats. Two other parties, the Christian Democrats and the Greens, both failed to get 5% of the vote, and so had to leave the Chamber. All in all, 26 parties ran, but only five reached the 5% threshold to get into the Chamber of Deputies.

It appears that the Civic Democrats, TOP 09, and Public Affairs will form some kind of center-right government. The negotiations were apparently somewhat rocky, though it is also possible that assembling the coalition required a certain amount of public drama to reassure voters that the parties really *were* independent of each other. All three campaigned on the need to rein in public spending and reform the health care system, and so, with a total of 118 seats, this is the strongest government since 1996, As one analyst notes, one particularly surprising aspect of this is that two out of the three parties that will govern are new parties.

However, this observation needs to be tempered by the fact that TOP 09 was formed after internal struggles within the Green and Christian Democratic parties -- the TOP 09 chairman, Karel Schwarzenberg, served as Foreign Minister as a Green, and second-in-command (and the power behind the throne) Miroslav Kalousek, was previously Minister of Finance as a Christian Democrat (KDU-ČSL). His fiscal conservatism and sometimes shady dealings, however, eventually caused a rift in the KDU-ČSL, and Schwarzenberg and Kalousek both found themselves in similar positions of leading influential factions in highly divided parties. After the collapse of the ODS--KDU-ČSL--Green government last year, TOP 09 emerged.

Later on, the Public Affairs party emerged as a somewhat anti-incumbency, anti-debt, anti-corruption rightish party. Even after the election, they are still considered a bit of an unknown quantity (and quality), and seem to be the "weak link" in the coalition. The party's chairman, Radek John, has no governing experience, and the party did not necessarily have the most comprehensive platform.

However, the attitude among many people is that for the first time, the Communist Party will be truly marginalized. Previously, Social Democrats could tactically use the Communists to undermine the other parties, and under the leadership of the former chairman, Jiří Paroubek, the party strategically deployed populist arguments. After the election, Paroubek resigned, though the new chairman, Bohuslav Sobotka may not change this. But after this election, they don't have the total votes to bring down the government, as they did a year ago.

The new government will almost certainly attempt to implement some kind of austerity program, though how public opinion will react to this once people start feeling its effects will be interesting. All three parties campaigned on "not becoming Greece," so if financial squeezes emerge in other European nations (Spain, we're talking about you), or if the papers continue to illustrate the inconvenience paying for years and years of budget deficits, the coalition will probably be allowed to implement their debt-reduction plans. But it's always easier for a politician to spend than to cut.

Finally, a word about the collapse of the Greens and KDU-ČSL. It's very unlikely that the Greens will re-emerge as a viable party, due to the churning nature of Czech politics. (There have typically been five parties in the Chamber: ODS, KDU-ČSL, ČSSD, KSČM, and a "fifth" that acts as a kingmaker. It has changed many times.) KDU-ČSL may not recover from this loss either, though they continue to be strong at the regional level in Moravia (the eastern part of Czech Republic, capital city: Brno). It will be the first time in 91 years that they will not be in the Chamber -- they even had a few seats during the Communist period, but that's for a new blog post -- and it will be interesting to see how they do in the next regional and local elections. They have some soul-searching of both the internal and external variety to do.