The Velvet Revolution by Bernard Wheaton & Zdeněk Kavan

Author:Bernard Wheaton & Zdeněk Kavan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Political Sphere

The agreed complexion of the government worked out between the CPC and CF in mid-December 1989 changed in favor of the latter when some of the leading members of the government, notably Komárek and Čalfa, resigned their party membership. This was linked to the tide of opinion reflected in surveys indicating that Communist members of the government were the least popular.6 A main task of the government was the creation of the institutional and legal conditions for the introduction of a pluralist, democratic political system. This entailed, among other actions, passing a new electoral law changing or abolishing arrangements that made the formation of new political parties difficult or impossible. This law was drafted in roundtable talks among representatives of all political trends and was passed by Parliament on March 2, 1990. The law is quite complex, especially in those areas determining the number of seats that each party gains and the number of mandates allocated to each electoral region; it is quite likely that the ordinary voter would be baffled by the procedures described. The system is based on proportional representation in which only political parties can, in practice, put up lists of candidates for general elections. In both the Czech Lands and Slovakia, parties gaining less than 5 percent of the total votes cast win no seats at all. Though the system does not involve preferential voting, the number of seats corresponding to the votes cast for those parties failing to hurdle the threshhold are reallocated to the successful parties on a pro rata basis. Voters are enabled to exert some relatively limited influence on the order of candidates on the list by expressing preferences for, at most, four candidates. One other significant element of the law is worth noting: It grants all political parties satisfying the minimum requirement for putting up lists of candidates (namely, 10,000 party members or signatures of support making up any shortfall) an equal amount of airtime on both television and radio during the forty-day election campaign. The system is clearly designed to lead to the creation of a relatively stable government based on large and popular political parties. It disproportionately favors the more successful parties and provides no space for independent candidates. It is sometimes forgotten that under the old regime, Czechoslovakia was not a one-party state, though the other parties were not particularly prominent in a largely lifeless Parliament dominated by the CPC. Popular distrust for the Communists extended in the new state to all political parties. The strong emphasis on a party political system hence seems slightly paradoxical. The principal beneficiary of public misgivings for parties in general was CF, as it had not constituted itself into a political party during the election campaign of spring 1990 and still retained its public persona as a citizens' organization, albeit in the election campaign it had to act to all intents and purposes as a political party.

CF at this stage occupied a unique position in that it was closely associated

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.