Politics has become more melodramatic since the mistress of the prime minister did her perp walk. But behind the scenes, all is under control.


Czech politics is full of sound and fury. But who is the evil clown in the background?

Few will mourn the reduction of ODS to the status of a minor parliamentary party this autumn. Many more will misunderstand the meaning of its decline.

The disintegration of ODS after almost a quarter of a century in power may seem momentous. But do not expect the collapse of one rotten political party, even a party as pervasively rotten as ODS, to bring any fundamental improvement in Czech politics. It will not.

The fall of ODS was triggered by a scandal orchestrated by ‘businessmen’ controlling competing factions within the party. The public prosecutor has served as their unwitting dupe, and Vaclav Klaus their enthusiastic backer.

If we want to understand the true insignificance of ODS’s collapse, we should look, not at those who have been removed from high positions in state-run institutions on the orders of the president and his puppets, but rather at those who have not.

We shall then appreciate the essential continuity that lies behind the melodrama of Czech politics, a melodrama best displayed by Miroslav Kalousek. The strong man of Czech politics (at least until this summer) would like us to believe that the country has shifted overnight from a healthy parliamentary democracy dominated by a frugal finance minister, into a nascent presidential dictatorship. So sudden, Mr Kalousek! Surely not!

In fact, what has happened is that a hateful old man bent on political revenge has been elected president by voters seeking a simple solution to the failure of an entire political class. President Zeman is wilfully exacerbating and exploiting the loss of legitimacy of political parties and other democratic institutions the better to consolidate his own power and the power of those threatened by open government.

Be sure that under Zeman’s CSSD, which is the CSSD that will be ruling this country shortly, the unpredictable behaviour of newcomers and upstarts (the feisty energy regulator, Alena Vitaskova, is a good example) will end.

Of course, the return of Zeman and his crowd spelt curtains for precocious youngsters like Radek Snabl and Petr Zaluda. Both men, the former a close associate of Miroslav Kalousek in the finance ministry said to be fond of pinching his female colleagues’ bottoms, the latter the dismissed head of Czech Railways said to be fond of having his own bottom pinched- flaunted their wealth. They were the easiest and most obvious villains to be defenestrated to please Zeman's electorate.

But someone like Vitaskova, as the head of an independent regulatory body, cannot simply be fired. She must either be tamed by intimidation, or framed and charged with fraud. But she will not be allowed to expose the identity of those ‘businessmen’ profiting so handsomely from their investments in solar parks.

And what about those who remain in their positions? Take the two real bosses of CEZ over the decade that Zeman has been out of power: Vladimir Johanes, the chairman of the supervisory board of Skoda Praha (a subsidiary of CEZ responsible for the renewal of the group’s fleet of power plants at an investment cost of €4 billion), and the multimillionaire Martin Roman, first CEO and now supervisory board chairman of CEZ itself.

Both men were appointed to their positions in early 2004, soon after the Zeman government had created the CEZ monopoly. They have survived seven prime ministers and five finance ministers since then. Neither will be removed in the presidential purge now underway, despite the scandals around them (villas and motor yachts in the Tuscan Isles; giant French boilers that do not work; overpriced spent nuclear fuel dumps built by off-shore companies represented by ODS politicians; related party transactions between CEZ and Skoda Transportation and Skoda Power; and so on).

And I would bet a dinner for two in the best restaurant in Pozzarello (where Johanes has his Tuscan villa), that neither man will be removed by a new CSSD-led government this autumn.

To this day, Johanes and Roman remain the two most important gatekeepers of CEZ’s immense capital investment programme: All politicians and suppliers (in so far as they can be distinguished) must go through them and their nominees, men like Daniel Benes, CEZ's CEO, and Jiri Kovar the golfer and nuclear fuel dump expert.


Vladimir Johanes (far right) has come along way since then.

Some readers will recall that Roman’s big break came in 2003, when the Appian Group bought Skoda Holding (allegedly with the proceeds from the fraudulent privatisation of MUS). Some of you might also recall that it was the then CSSD industry minister, Jiri Rusnok, and his deputy, Martin Pecina who sold MUS to Appian.

Political parties and politicians are expendable, but Vladimir Johanes and Martin Roman are not. They remain living proof of the essential stability of an elite that spans generations, not election terms.

Next spring, long after non-entities like Martin Kuba are forgotten, these two will be celebrating ten years in control of CEZ. And the people’s president, along with his oldest political ally, Vaclav Klaus, will no doubt be celebrating with them, in spirit certainly and perhaps even in person, in Pozzarello on Monte Argentario.