Exercising the freedom not to vote for the cartel party-state and its proxies.

Erik Best writes in his Final Word column today that the “the strong showing of the Communists in these elections has overshadowed the fact that few protest candidates made it into the regional assemblies or second round of the Senate balloting. If you accept that the Communists are actually part of the Establishment and not a protest party, the main outcome of the elections is the invalidation of the protest vote.”

Best is right. The protest voter protested by refusing to vote. Only one third of the one third of the electorate that voted over the weekend in regional elections voted for non-aligned candidates. The rest voted for Establishment parties. In the Senate elections, the picture is the same. In today’s upper house there are some 20 Senators who are not attached, at least formally, to Establishment parties. After the second round, we can expect there to be under 10.

We would expect that the widespread disgust felt for the political class by so many people would translate into a surge of support for new candidates and parties. But the great majority of the electorate registered this disgust by not voting at all. The experience with TOP 09 and VV has taught people not to trust 'new' political parties.

In the short term at least, these election results are an ideal outcome for what Best calls the ‘supra-political class’ and what others would call the cartel party-state, which prefers low turnouts (but not too low) and a passive citizenry. In the longer term, the system will become precariously unbalanced by the dramatic weakening of the 'Right' in favour of the 'Left'. A correction will be required to maintain the stability which we have suffered for the last twenty years.

Let me explain.

The Czech Republic is a democratic system in decay, a system in which, over two decades, the electorate has been effectively disenfranchised. I mean by this that regular elections occur but they have little to no impact on how power is exercised. The mainstream political parties have grabbed for themselves the legal and economic power of the state.

This is not just a Czech problem of course. The theory of the cartel party-state developed by political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair explains well how this disenfranchisement has occurred throughout the democratic world. And yet it does help us to understand these most recent election results.

The concept of the cartel party-state explains how parties collude rather than compete, and how they capture the resources of the state to ensure their own survival, to such an extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish between them and the state. As Katz and Mair explain, the goals of politics become self-referential, professional and technocratic. Election campaigns are designed to exclude the active involvement of citizens: capital-intensive, professional and controlled from central party headquarters, and of course largely funded by the state.

Democracy ceases to be seen as the means by which civic society limits the power of the state and instead has become a service that the state provides to civic society. What little party competition remains is focused on the efficient and effective management of the state if you are lucky, in Germany for example, and on the systemic destruction of public value if you are not, in the Czech Republic for example. What distinguishes the Czech Republic from Germany is not the difference in relations between party and state, but rather in the quality of the service provided. The Czech Republic displays the symptoms of the cartel party-state in an advanced state of decline, a decline caused by the apathy of its citizens to the excesses of its ruling elite.

We all sense that the substantive differences between the winner and loser of elections are minimal. This is because In fact the mainstream parties are never really out of power. The system is so built that it protects itself against outsiders.

The fact that the Communists have not been in government does not make them outsiders. They have been essential in the functioning of the system, in both national and regional parliaments, and indeed in the election of the president.

The mainstream parties use their control of the state’s resources to block the emergence of competitors. The independence of state institutions, regulatory organs, trade unions, even the judiciary, has been undermined by a system of client privileges granted in exchange for obedience and passivity. In the words of Katz and Mair, the state has become an ‘institutionalized support structure rewarding insiders and excluding all alternatives.’

So much for the theory, what about the practice of Czech politics today? The CSSD will now wish to increase the national coalition potential of the Communists by forming regional coalitions with them in 10 out of 13 regions. We should prepare ourselves for the unsettling prospect that CSSD and KSCM will together hold a constitutional or 3/5ths majority (50 seats) in the upper house by next week, and very probably in the lower house too after the next parliamentary elections (120 seats). And we may then expect CSSD to cannibalise KSCM as SMER has cannibalised its natural coalition partners in Slovakia. And Fidesz in Hungary.

This consolidation of the ‘Left’ will destabilise the cartel party-state in the same way that too strong a street gang upsets the dismal equilibrium of a bad neighbourhood. A correction will be required if the cartel party-state is to continue to appear balanced, and so maintain the fiction of electoral competition.

It is now very much in the Establishment’s interest that the ‘Right’ consolidate as well, in order to preserve this appearance and this fiction, and so discourage the full scale mobilisation of the protest vote, which would plunge the political class into the abyss.