The challenge is to remove cancerous political tissue without killing a weakened body politic.



A defining part of the Czech body politic: "I was there when the Opposition Agreement was made and as an expert since 1989" (Já jsem byl účasten kdy se skládala opoziční smlouva, nebo už od roku 1989 jako expert.)

In the months ahead, Andrej Babis will make life extremely uncomfortable for Miroslav Kalousek. This will have dramatic repercussions on politics, by no means all desirable.

The rhetorical skirmishing between Babis and Kalousek of the last twelve months will now escalate. The appointment to the new finance minister’s team of the lawyer Robert Pelikan and the auditor Lukas Wagenknecht amounts to a declaration of forensic war on Babis's ministerial predecessor. Both Pelikan and Wagenknecht are outspoken public critics of Kalousek. Both have been harmed, professionally, by him.

Kalousek blocked Pelikan from becoming a member of the telecoms regulator in 2013 after Pelikan had called him a crook. Here is what Kalousek had to say about Pelikan at the time: "If Mr Pelikan is convinced that the Necas government shoves lots of money into the laps of local mafia and that the finance minister is a crook, then he should not be appointed to public office. He should wait until Mr Babis is in government." (Jestli je pan Pelikán přesvědčen, že vláda Petra Nečase strká velké peníze kmotrům a že ministr financí je zloděj, tak by se od takových lidí neměl vůbec nechat jmenovat do funkce. Měl by počkat například na vládu pana Babiše.) Mr Pelikan did wait until Mr Babis got into government. And he is still just as determined to prove that Kalousek is a crook.

Lukas Wagenknecht is likewise a victim of Miroslav Kalousek. It appears that Wagenknecht had to leave Deloitte in 2013, after five years as an auditor with the firm, because his exposure of fraud in EU-funded regional operational programs had become a grave embarrassment to Kalousek’s finance ministry. This must have been somewhat awkward for his employer. The Czech finance ministry has been one of Deloitte’s most reliable public sector clients over the years, the others being the interior ministry and state-owned CEZ. And Deloitte has been a most reliable auditor for the finance minister and CEO of CEZ as well. See here for a fascinating article that drops some heavy hints about why Deloitte and Wagenknecht parted company last year: http://euro.e15.cz/archiv/dalsi-kritik-na-odstrel-1036821#utm_medium=selfpromo&utm_source=e15&utm_campaign=copylink

It is a marvel for which we have Babis to thank that two such public-spirited and determined individuals are now so close to the centre of political power. Deloitte must be concerned about the impact this will have on their business relations with one of their better customers -the Czech state. And Kalousek must be alarmed about the impact this will have on his freedom. After 25 years in politics, it is high time that Kalousek did something else, and if he has stolen billions from the Czech people, as Pelikan insists, about time that he did it behind bars.

But however necessary and however deserved, do not overlook the risks to the body politic in its present weakened state of prosecuting Kalousek. The psychological impact of arresting, let alone of convicting a man who had come to define Czech politics, would be immensely therapeutic, a closure of sorts. But the political impact could easily be to kill off TOP 09.

Babis is spreading rumours that TOP 09 and its partner STAN will split. These rumours are likely to be true but whilst it is in the public interest that criminals be jailed, it is hardly in the public interest that TOP 09 collapse. The news today that STAN’s leader, Petr Gazdik, who has become synonymous with TOP 09, will not run again for chairman of the mayoral grouping, suggest that Kalousek has become a political liability from which STAN would like to distance itself.

Like the rest of us, STAN is preparing for life after Kalousek, and quite possibly, after TOP 09 as well. With ODS already in ignominious ruins, the electoral disintegration of TOP 09 will mean the end of all effective parliamentary opposition to Babis, at least in this critical year of elections. This is democracy, you will say. Indeed it is. And it is also dangerous, acutely so if Babis is susceptible to the corrosive influence of power.

Czech politics have arrived at a critical junction after 25 years of imperfect parliamentary government, a political model which entered its degenerative phase in 1998 with the Klaus-Zeman Pact, and its critical phase last year with the introduction of a directly elected head of state and the formation of a presidential government.

Today, one direction points towards a new, non-partisan era of government led by technocrats and legitimised by referenda in which we choose our favourite policies through social media and at public rallies, a thoroughly debased form of democracy championed by the television celebrity Tomio Okamura. The other direction would return us to the time before the competition between political parties was replaced by the cartel party state in 1998.

In the minds of his million voters, Andrej Babis straddles both paths. For some of them, he offers a hope of restoration of robust, muddled, messy, competitive parliamentary politics; for others, its replacement with something he calls efficiency. The worrying thing is that such a large minority of the population consider this a choice.