But there's another aspect to the assaults worth examining.

Whenever there is total media saturation of an event, it's extremely interesting to watch the public's reaction. In these instances that reaction, as manifested on various Internet fora or in the voluminous readers' mail to the Internet journal Britské listy, has been quite remarkable. While not a fully representative cross-section of Czech society, the responses have been so consistent that I feel they do say something quite worrying about the values of the nation's more vociferous members.

In the Dolejš instance, the vox populi seemed to coincide to a large degree with the view of the Czech right-wing press. The media, fearing a rise in the popularity of the communists (KSČM) noted that Dolejš had been roughed up, and quickly started an intensive counter-campaign, basically arguing that we shouldn't feel sorry for him because Stalin was a murderer thus unashamedly linking the worst excesses of totalitarian communist rule with this moderate MP.

It would appear that the public on the whole agreed with this line of reasoning. Since in the Czech Republic no one seems to trust anyone, there has also been a lot of rather "gothic" conspiracy theories: According to numerous correspondents, both Dolejš and Jacques had actually "organized" the assaults on themselves in order to manipulate the public to vote for them.

The opposition line

But there was something extra in the popular reactions to the Jacques incident, something of much concern. Here, the readers' voices were, on the whole, in opposition to the line taken by the Czech media.

Two factors seem to have coincided in this instance. In the first, many people have said that Kateřina Jacques "had it coming" because she had "defied the police" and one must "obey the orders of a police officer no matter what." These correspondents seemed to be unmoved by the fact that the reaction of the police was excessive and unprofessional, and prone to siding with the police whatever the circumstances. Is this evidence that many Czechs would actually prefer a return to authoritarian rule?

But the other type of reaction to the Jacques case has been even more worrying. Many members of the general public seem to have a problem with the simple fact that Jacques is a woman, that she is a politician and that she acts assertively in public. "Why all this fuss about a hysterical bitch?" wrote a great many in the chat rooms. "How dare she appear in public and take her children with her? If she was my wife, she would get a right thrashing on getting back home," opined one enlightened reader.

The position of women in Czech society is extremely difficult, as was pointed out by several women in a recent Britské listy debate. As a man, you're allowed to be assertive, they wrote, while an assertive woman is automatically labeled a "hysterical bitch." Although the men soundly rejected this summation, the public Jacques incident seems to confirm that these women are unfortunately accurate.

Jan Čulík is the editor in chief of Britské listy, www.blisty.cz. He also teaches Czech studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.