The political success of Babis and Okamura is one of the most significant blows to the democratic structure of the state in the last 25 years.



Let me introduce the next environment minister! Richard Brabec of Lovochemie!

Common sense dictates that the systemic corruption afflicting public life here must be unravelled gradually. The challenge is to calibrate the assault on institutional corruption in such a way that it punishes and deters without destroying the very institutions themselves, or more simply said, how to avoid throwing the baby out with the dirty bathwater.

Here is an example of what I mean. The Nagyova police raids began in the early morning of June 13, 2013. Five days later, the prime minister had resigned. Five months later, his party, which had ruled the country more or less continuously for twenty years, had been wiped out in an early general election held as a direct result of those raids. Its electorate moved en masse to a billionaire businessman and a TV personality, neither of whom has a political party behind them.

ODS was the bathwater, and my goodness how dirty it had got! It has now been thrown out of power and about time too. The image of an unshaven, suntanned Petr Bendl in an open neck shirt sitting among the remnants of the party’s parliamentary club yesterday in the opening session of the new parliament said it all –arrogance, greed and stupidity rolled into one smug bundle. The other 199 members of parliament thought the occasion worthy of a necktie.



But the satisfaction in seeing ODS ruined should not cause us to lose sight of the damage done to the legitimacy of the institution of the political party as such – the baby.

The disappearance of a party called the Civic Democrats is of no lasting significance. But the loss of faith ODS caused in the institution of the political party, the most important building block of a parliamentary system of government, will last for years. This is the real crime of ODS, a crime that is much harder to forgive than its fraudulent championing of the rule of law and the free market economy.

The political arrival of Andrej Babis and Tomio Okamura is taken by some as cause for great celebration. Their admirers see in them a wave of creative destruction, with a dynamic new order of super efficient managers and pragmatic experts sweeping aside a degenerate political elite.

This is drivel.

However much we might have despised ODS, the success of Babis and Okamura remains one of the most significant blows to the democratic structure of the state in the last 25 years. An important classical democratic principle, that government ministries should be staffed by independent experts (called civil servants) but led by elected politicians, is no longer taken for granted. While most still consider appropriate the principle of civilian control of the military, when it comes to the ministries of finance, industry and health, it is bankers, industrialists and hospital directors that people want in charge.

Andrej Babis enthusiastically promotes this popular and utterly misguided view. His latest cabinet nominations, for the post of environment minister no less, are either Jiri Tyc, a nuclear engineer employed at Temelin NPP, or his own employee, Richard Brabec, who runs the fertiliser manufacturer Lovochemie. Are they all that Babis can come up with?

Between them, Babis and Okamura control almost one third of the lower house of parliament. An immense amount of political power has now been placed in the hands of two men who are essentially unaccountable. They might be good men and they might not. But without robust institutions to hold them in check, all we can do is keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.