Which came first, power or impunity?

It is futile to try to identify the first case of a circular cause and consequence. Whether ODS is the cause and TOP 09 the consequence of our political troubles may count in the theatre of Czech party politics, but it is a matter of complete indifference in a court of law.

Like power and impunity, Petr Nečas and Miroslav Kalousek have become hard to distinguish. Who knows and who any longer cares which of them is the cause and which the consequence?

Both men are now seeking to present an assault on their feelings of impunity as an attack on our freedoms and the good name of the Czech Republic.

For them to criticise state prosecutors of an abuse of power just shows how power corrupts, above all by allowing those who hold it to regard themselves as above the law.

Nečas is undoubtedly a reluctant abuser of power, whereas to Kalousek the abuse of power comes naturally. Always quick to display his contempt for the law, Kalousek dared to ask on television the rhetorical question of whether we wished to be ruled by elected politicians or by prosecutors, as if this was the choice before us.

We wish to live under the rule of law, a condition in which judges interpret, prosecutors and police enforce, and elected politicians make the laws under which we must all live.

Listening to the prime minister before the weekend, I was struck by how much like Kalousek he has become, in substance if not in style. His statements were excessively self-referential and pedantic given the earthquake that is now shaking this country -as if he mattered. To challenge the credibility of his own law enforcement agencies was wreckless.

And as for Kalousek, he has long thought of himself as inseparable from the state itself. This is not the first time he has publicly and vociferously sought to undermine the state prosecutor and police. How many times has he done so in private? Recall his desperate interventions a year ago on behalf of the former defence minister Vlasta Parkanová, his own 'Nagyová' moment. The police, he warned, were threatening democracy.

When interpreting Kalousek's public reaction to Nečas's troubles, it would be wise to recall his past abusive behaviour towards the state prosecution service. And to repeat to yourself his very words, that as finance minister and the so-called 'guarantor' of the way laws are interpreted, he will issue an interpretive guide to state prosecutors, and will say, "In the name of the Republic, these paragraphs must be interpreted in the following way" ("Vydám výkladový sborník a poskytnu ho složkám státu včetně státního zastupitelství a řeknu: "Jménem republiky, ty paragrafy se musejí vykládat takto a takto.")

It took just one day for the state prosecutor to end the theatrical disputes between politicians, and to push them publicly to support each other in the face of this novel threat -equality before the law for government ministers.

Law has touched power at last, and the feeling of impunity that power engenders and on which power feeds. It is as much a joy to witness the powerlessness of the powerful as it is to exercise the power of the powerless. Long may it last.