The intense campaign of this year’s elections is behind us, and it fills me with joy that the outcome didn’t lead to protests in the streets. After the first round of elections, I, like most people, began to sense the heightened tension in society, and I now imagine what it might have looked like if the second candidate had won: uncritical supporters of Peter Pavel, backed by media that cannot be called impartial, would have taken to the streets to challenge the election result. Just like what happened in the United States after Donald Trump’s victory. Liberal democrats always find it difficult to accept when elections don’t go their way, even though it contradicts their ideology of truth and love.
I still remember the elections during the previous regime. Candidates had to be chosen from the National Front. It was not possible to mention that they were not good enough or qualified, or that we would like to propose someone from the opposition. The party and the government decided what was the right opinion. This opinion was conveyed by media – television and the press under the control of the regime. Everything else was anti-state, opportunistic, and reactionary. I can still hear the headline of the legendary article “The Failures and Self-Appointed,” which was published in the communist Rude Pravo on January 12, 1977, in which the Czechoslovak public was informed about the existence of Charter 77. The article was part of a discrediting campaign aimed at undermining the credibility of Charter 77 and its signatories. For Husák’s regime, they were the frustrated people, the desolates, and the “undemocratic” voters of that time, whatever this counter-argument meant.
My motto is, as we say at home, “Don’t kick a dead horse,” in the sense that if you’ve won against an opponent, acknowledge their worth. Prime Minister Fiala’s speech on Saturday, where he announced the election of Peter Pavel as the president long before all the votes were counted, reminded me a bit of the above-mentioned practices that suppress the opposition and free discussion in society. Instead of using the opportunity to calm people and attempt to unify the country after a heated election campaign (as Peter Pavel tried to do in his first speech on the same day), the Prime Minister firmly positioned himself against 2.4 million citizens who voted for the unsuccessful candidate and even against Peter Pavel himself. Simultaneously, he placed a new president with no political experience squarely in the middle of the fight for freedom of speech. At least for those who didn’t vote for him and now feel immense pressure to rejoice and, most importantly, remain silent.
It used to be said that freedom of speech is not only important before a speech but also after it. The fanatical support of Peter Pavel, which resulted in sharp attacks by his supporters on any critical or skeptical opinion, including disrupting the election rallies of the opposing candidate, should concern any democratically minded citizen of this country at the very least.
Are we getting back to a time when we should hide our critical opinions, so as not to harm ourselves or our loved ones? Will we tell our children to avoid expressing “anti-state” views, especially in school? And in a time of increasing influence of progressives, what could be considered “anti-state” can vary widely. For example, the assertion that people are divided into men and women. Or that the radical implementation of the Green Deal will push Europe into poverty and deprive it of its already weak geopolitical position. That it is not proven that only humans are responsible for global climate change because the recent ice ages weren’t caused by cavemen’s campfires, and Greenland wasn’t called the “Green Land” for no reason.
Ivana Tykač,
