Czech Republic
Czech workers are turning towards the Communist Party, in frustration at the country's first Social Democratic government. Adam Novak Unemployment has continued to rise since Milos Zeman's Social Democrats took power in 1998. And the party has failed to take the promised action against "thieves and profiteers" who dominated the country's mass privatisation process.
As the overwhelmingly rightwing media try to discredit and divide the Social Democrats, the main benefactors seem to be the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), which now has over 18% voter support, up from 11% during the 1998
"Voters expected dramatic steps from the Social Democrats, " explains Jan Herzmann of the Sofres-Factum public opinion survey company. "71% of those who voted for the Social Democrats in 1998 wanted the party to investigate all cases of privatisation since 1989, and at least half wanted the new government to renationalise all 'bad' cases of privatisation."
In fact, after nine years of limited reform under "Thatcherite" Premier Vaclav Klaus, it is the Social Democrats who are now trying to privatise the (highly profitable) breweries and (less successful) airline.
About eleven percent of Czech voters are solid supporters of the Communist Party. It has renounced Stalinism but (unlike its sister parties across Eastern Europe) resisted the trend towards i social democratic politics. A recent opinion poll suggests that the increasing support for the party comes from strongly anti-Stalinist voters, who are angry at the country's mainstream parties. Communist preferences have particularly risen in the northern economic decline since 1989.
Although the party's core support comes from older workers and the retired-the main victims of the transition to capitalism-the new supporters include many younger people. But according to Herzmann, "these younger supporters are mainly attracted to the original, Communist ideal. The party has done little to open itself to frustrated ecological activists."
The party has 22% support among those over 45, but only 7% support in the under-29 age group. Eighteen percent of manual workers now say they would vote for the party. Most of the increasing support for the Communists comes from men. Only 12% of women say they would vote for the party, compared to over 20% of men.
Voters "increasingly have the impression that the current political class do not behave any better than the pre-1989 [Stalinist] elite," says Hermann. "The feeling that the pre-1989 system was a bad one is weakening. People are gradually idealising the past. Sometimes for understandable reasons. When someone loses his job after thirty years, and can't find work, then his main memory isn't that, in the Communist days, there was always a shortage of bananas. He is more likely to remember that, in the old days, everyone was in work, everyone earned a salary."
"There is a general radicalisation of society. Radical feelings about unequal property relations; income inequality; hostitowards multinational corporations and foreign investors. More and more people are willing to consider participation in some form of protest, or voting for a radical party."
Since 1989, the Czech media and political elite have marginalised and demonised the Communist Party. But some now think that incorporating the would be the best way to neutralise worker discontent. Herzmann is convinced that "the party's core voters could easily be reoriented towards the centre-left," if the party adopted a social-democratic programme. According to Mlada
Dnes newspaper, a "modernised" Communist Party could hope to win 25% of the vote, reducing the Social Demo-
Only 15% of those who voted Communist in 1988 would like to see a return to pre-1989 conditions. Hardline ex-party boss Miroslav Stepan is trying to organise these voters behind an unrepentant Stalinist party. As the Communists are capturing most of the strongly dissatisfied voters, support for the Stalinists, and for the far-right Republicans, has fallen sharply. * Statistics from Miada Fronta Dnes, 19 August 1999 Bohemia's Roma ghetto • Government human rights emmissary Petr Uhl has pleaded with residents of the north Bohemian town of Usti nad Labem not to "ghettoise" their Roma ("gypsy") population.
The ghetto was created in 1993, when authorities began regrouping "non-rent-paying" families, and those expelled when private landlords reclaimed their pre-1945 property under the controversial "restitution" laws. Two years later, demanded action against their "noisy and smelly" Roma neighbours.
The town council promised to build a four metre high wall down the middle of the street When the story was picked up by international media, they backed down-proposing only a two-metre high, ceramic struc-
"purely as a noise barrier." Until 1989 Uhl was a key member of the Charta 77 dissident movement, and one of the few revolutionary Marxists in the east-European pro-democracy movement. Since the fall of the Stalinist regime he has focused on new human rights questions, particularly the detence oi
) minority. When Czechoslovakia split, a Slovak passport, to illustrate the arbitrary nature of the rules that divided the population and threatened to exclude most Czech Roma from citizenship on the basis of their (often distant) Slovak origins.. This article includes material from Lidové noviny, 19 August.
International Viewpoint #315 October 1999
Netherlands The nation against the EU
The SP electoral programme is very clear about the European Union: "a non-democratic super-state... asocial... the expression of the all-powerfulness of the big multinationals.. blind abandon to the Euro.. worsening ecological conditions... building a superpower... a fortress Europe... Meijer's electoral campaign focused on "those who are filling their pockets in Brussels and Strasburg," EU institutions are concentrated.) The party distributed sponges, in protest at dirty money politics.
Unfortunately, the electoral programme said very little about non-economic questions, like refugee policy, sustainable development, and women's position in society.
The SP "wants to work from below, to build another type of Europe... oriented towards the well-being of people and their environment. With decisions made as close as possible tos the citizens, in their towns and regions."
The party considers that "the European Council, Commission, Central Bank, and even the European Parliament should not have the final word in making pan-European agreements. Each national parliament should have the last word... no decision of the European Parliament should be valid in a country until it has been ratified by the national parliament." European integration, for the SP, can only be 'on the basis of co-operation between free, sovereign nations.
But this doesn't solve the problem. For example, the SP condemns the huge autonomy given to the European Central Bank (headed by Dutch social democrat Wim Duisberg). The problem
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<Internationa/_Viewpoint@compuserve.com> 12 International Viewpoint #315 October 1999 is that this autonomy was approved by the Dutch parament, as part of a transfer of sovereignty to the supranational level.
The SP has also approved the common declaration of Europe's Communist Parties (who sit together in the European Parliament as the United European Left) demanding a radical reduction in working hours, without loss of salary, a common tax on speculative capital, and "more determined" pan-European measures to reduce unemployment
But Eurolegislation along these opt out of legislation on the 35-hour week, and the introduction of a "Tobin" tax on financial speculation? * The author is a member of SAP, the Dutch section of the Fourth International, which supported the SP election campaign. Green Left • The Green Left won 12% of the vote (four seats) in a campaign that stressed progressive reforms of the EU: revision of the Amsterdam Treaty (on neoliberal coordination), laboration of a European Constitution, on the base of a referendum, more powers for the European parliament, abolition of the "safe third country" rule which makes it easier to expel asylum seekers, no deepening of police cooperation, greater political control over the European Central Bank, abolition of the Euratom nuclear programme, and a tax on speculative capital. gence criteria, and the Amsterdam stability pact. But it has abandoned its extra-parliamentary origins, in favour of respect for the rules of the largely symbolic European Parliament.
The party is also enthusiastic about EU coordinated foreign and "defence" policy. They say NATO should transter its transport and logistics role to the OCSE (a European defence council which includes Russia and the east European states.) But there is little to differentiate the GL's call for more, and better humanitarian interventions, from NATO's own self-appointed new role. In the Kosovo crisis, the GL supported NATO's illegal war against Yugoslavia, despite an electoral programme which calls for dissolving NATO! [BdV] *
More than 30,000 people joined the European demonstration against unemployment, racism and war in Cologne, Germany on 29 May, the venue of the European Summit of European heads of state.
Activists from most countries in Europe protested that the countries of the European Union failed to fight unemployment although all except Spain and Ireland are governed by Social Democrats.
The demonstrators also protested against EU plans to reduce real minimum wages and cut the social security system.
Banners, posters and speeches stressed the multiple connections between war, unemployment and social deprivation.
The number of participants was similar to the network's 1997 Amsterdam demonstration
Over the following days, ore than a hundred activists of unemployed movements from Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Great Britain, Holland Scandinavia, Italy and Switzerland participated in the three "counter-Parliament" sessions organised by the European Marches against Unemployment
The participants made a long list of a wide variety of proposals, ranging from the "Tobin" tax on financial speculation to the four-day-week. After discussion in each country, these proposals could be added to the platforms adopted by previous European Marches network meetings Cologne, January 99).
The "Parliament" made two proposals for collective action. First, a European day of action for a guaranteed income and against workfare, in December 1999. Secondly, a big international demonstration in France, to be held sometime towards the end of 2000.