The STAN party emerged as the winner of this weekend’s local elections in the Czech Republic, with its candidates securing victories across the country. I keep encountering expressions of astonishment at how the party could perform so well despite appalling scandals involving billions of crowns stolen from municipal enterprises, witnesses dying under suspicious circumstances that appear to be suicides, and the party chairman holding encrypted conversations with a mafia boss. How can people continue voting for them despite all this?
Quite the contrary. They succeed because of it.
Their local criminal activities reveal precisely the strength that wins elections of this kind. Of course, it would have been better if none of it had come to light and no dead bodies had been involved. Nevertheless, these affairs demonstrate a remarkable ability to take control of an organization and extract money from it for years.
National elections are contests between power groups operating at the national level. Local elections, municipal elections, and elections to the Senate are contests between local power structures. Make no mistake: even the handful of independent senators—or, more precisely, female senators—who have broken through in recent years previously spent many years in local politics and maintained excellent connections with local centers of power.
Such elections, therefore, do not measure public sentiment. They measure how extensive a network of associations, interest groups, and mafias each political force has managed to build. Indeed, candidates frequently run under disguised party labels, so that parliamentary parties compete under names such as “Happy Newcastle” and “Newcastle Forward!”
Elections of this kind do not measure public sentiment. They measure the networks each faction has built and whether it can keep its sphere of influence intact.
The governing parties have had two years in which to expand, win over local mafias, support them with funds allocated by the central government, and, conversely, cut rival associations off from financial assistance, place obstacles in their way, or persuade them to switch political allegiance. That is how the previous government operated.
But when your slogan is “There Will Be No Stealing,” and you probably even believe it, maintaining power structures becomes exceedingly difficult. I do not mean this as praise for Andrej Babiš. If someone loses because he is more honest than his opponent, he is a fool who endangers both himself and his supporters.
What is interesting is how unstable these local mafias are over time—or, more precisely, how readily they switch parties.
Long ago, political struggles across much of the country were fought between the orange camp and local mafias. What remains of them today? Just a few years ago, it was the Pirates who were building local networks of power with astonishing efficiency. I even predicted that they would come to dominate the country. Where are they now?
I therefore suspect that STAN’s dominance will not last either. The local mafiosi will remain, but in a few years they will be wearing different political jerseys.
Only the Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) are exceptional. They mastered this art during the harshest years of communism, when they managed to reach an accommodation with the Stalinist regime. They practice it today as an exemplary party of European values, and they handled it perfectly well under every regime in between.