Czech Republic

THE TWO DOMINANT left-wing parties in the Czech Republic, since its creation in 1993, have been the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia and the Social Democratic Party. The first is the unreformed continuation of the totalitarian Communist Party that ruled Czechoslovakia (that was divided at the end of 1992 into the Czech and Slovak Republics) from 1948 to 1989. The Social Democrats won the elections of 1998 and 2002 and formed coalition governments under the premiership of Milos Zeman and Vladimir Spidla.

The Communist Party has won the support of about 20 percent of population in recent years, a rise from a steady 13 percent prior to 2000. This makes it the strongest unreformed Communist Party in any European Union country. Much of the support for the Communist Party is drawn from population sectors that became disaffected following the transition from communist command economy: workers in the large heavy industries and mines in northern Bohemia and Moravia who lost their jobs without government subsidies and following new pollution control regulations; pensioners who spent most of their lives in an apparently egalitarian environment and react with envy and resentment to the increasing visible gap in income that followed economic reforms and growth; unemployed young people; and residents of the border areas with Germany who settled in the homes of Sudeten Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946 and fear German claims for their homes following unification with Europe.

Another source of support for the Communist Party comes from the former higher echelons of the Czechoslovak Communist Party that ran that country under communism and still dominate the now-privatized national economy and the middle to high state bureaucracy.

Prior to World War II, communism and other leftist ideologies built on the egalitarian traditions of the Czech village communities that survived when farmers became urban industrial workers and on the leftist sympathies of the intelligentsia. These tendencies were strongly reinforced by the British and French betrayal of democratic Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler's Germany in the Munich accords of 1938. After the liberation of most of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army, the Communist Party emerged as the strongest political force. In February of 1948 they took over the government and abolished democracy in a fairly popular revolution, although how popular is disputed.

The 1950s were marked by the imposition of the Stalinist model on Czechoslovakia, marked by terror, labor camps, persecution of political opponents, antiSemitism, and the settling of scores within the communist elite through show trials and executions. The 1960s witnessed an attempt to liberalize communism and institute “Communism with a human face” under the leadership of Alexander Dubcek. The losing, orthodox, wing of the Communist Party then invited a Soviet invasion in 1968 that put an end to the “Prague Spring.” About half a million members of the Communist Party who were involved with liberal reforms were expelled from the party and replaced by new members loyal to the orthodox communists, who, then in the process of “normalization” during the 1970s, placed their loyalists in all positions of power in the state, its security forces, industries, bureaucracy, and educational institutions.

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