WHAT'S ON BRITSKÉ LISTY

Heads up

15. 7. 2010 / Přemysl Janýr

In his article "Heads into the sand", Karel Dolejší disagrees with my article "Lessons from the Elections", for he believes that I am blindly believing the political program of TOP 09 and Public Affairs parties.

He was not the only one who criticized me, even though I wrote about the shift in values and expectations from voters and not about the two political parties per se. This habit of reducing a topic into a denunciation of the author is in the Czech rhetorical culture so widespread that it is worth an article itself.

Karel Dolejší is not satisfied with the new parties. However, all he can do is to wait until some party that better represents him show up. He's been waiting long enough and so far, nothing...

Different from him I don't perceive political parties as some kind of fashion show models, fighting in the catwalk for the sympathy of Karel's critical eye. I believe that parties are made of people like him or me, people who live among us, share the same values and have to go through the same frustrations as we do. Many of them really want to bring solutions to our problems, others measure up the power they can get. In both cases, however, they are led to offering a political program that expresses the needs and values of the people around them expect and resonate.

What decides a political party's program is the the society's values model system. Of course we can also say that even the political parties themselves influence back the values system of their society. That would happen only if they were subjects not dependant on alluring members of their society to be able to get votes. Dolejší hasn't lived the 1960s, when, under pressure from the change in the nation's collective consciousness, it was the communist party itself that took over the reform process, even if it was exactly the party that had been trying, during the previous years, to establish how that society should be.

I wrote about the development of those changes in our values system, I didn't judge the credibility of any concrete party.

It is secondary how real is the conservative party TOP 09 -- the election success of their program evidences a need from their voters for the values of tradition, moral and stability. It is also secondary whether the Public Affairs party are authentically representing our civil society. Important is that their marketing strategy bet on that concept of a participative civil society and won.

And because the success in one election is not at all a guarantee of another win in the following elections, so a successful political program is even a vector from which no party can run away without fatal consequences.

Karel Dolejší calculates when and how both new parties will get corrupted. He may even be right, not to mention that I also don't believe that political parties are the ones who can fix our problems. The two newcomers may end up like the Greens or the Christian Democrats and some other parties will come take their place. What we really depend on, to bring about changes in a society is how energetically can citizens take to force upon the political scene their expectations and needs. But it is not relevant which party in the end fulfills them.

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