Sobotka seeks coalition partners

Three-way coalition could have 11-seat majority

The Czech Social Democrats have begun seeking coalition partners, after the party’s leader crushed an attempt to unseat him by a group close to the president.

Confirmed in power, Bohuslav Sobotka, the leader of the Social Democrats (C?SSD), on Sunday (10 November) began exploring the possibility of forging a three-party coalition with a large, new party belonging to Europe’s family of liberal parties – the ANO movement of billionaire Andrej Babiš – and the small Christian Democrat (KDU-SL) party. Together, the three would have an 11-seat majority in the Czech Republic’s 200-member parliament.

Coalition talks are likely to prove difficult, and the result could see the probable kingmaker, Babiš, opt to stay outside government. Babiš, a controversial industrialist who entered politics only two years ago, indicated that he might prefer to lead his party from outside government after questions were raised about his communist-era history. Babiš is currently suing the Slovak institute of national history after it listed him as a collaborator with the Czechoslovak secret police.

Policy differences that could cause the coalition to founder include the issue of church restitution, tax levels, and pension reform.

Sobotka may, however, feel that he has already mastered his greatest challenge, by preventing a group within the party from ousting him after the CSSD secured only 20.5% of the popular vote in parliamentary elections held on 25-26 October. The ‘putschists’ argued that a sharp drop of between 8-10 percentage points over the course of the election campaign amounted to a vote of no confidence in the 42-year-old Sobotka.

Sobotka fractured the group and eventually removed it from the leadership at an extraordinary meeting of the leadership on Sunday. In the process, the rebels’ collusion with and subsequent denials of secret meetings with President Miloš Zeman were revealed.

Zeman has yet formally to give Sobotka the task of forming a government. The president has been confined to his castle and to a wheelchair since an accident whose nature remains obscure, but he said that naming a government was “a somewhat more dignified matter” than he could handle “from a wheelchair”.

The statement immediately prompted an angry response from an association representing wheelchair-users.

The delay in creating a government has already had an impact on the Czech Republic’s dealings with the European Union. When it joined the European Union in 2004 it had already passed a civil-service act, as required by the EU, limiting the potential for a politicisation of the public administration. It has yet to implement the law. The European Commission gave it until the end of this year to do so or face the prospect of losing some of its entitlement from the EU’s 2014-20 budget. In the absence of a new government, the Commission has extended the deadline to mid-2014.

In the meantime, the caretaker government has been continuing to make changes at the top of a range of ministries, as it began doing when it was put together in June by Zeman.

After the collapse of the previous government, a three-party coalition led by Petr Nečas, Zeman chose to give the reins of government to technocrats associated with him, rather than to three centre-right parties with a parliamentary majority.

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