Czech columnist compares ruling coalition to normalization era

In an opinion column, a Czech commentator compares the current governing coalition to the era of normalization. This is the author's personal assessment, not established fact.

He begins with two stories from the past. One is about a trade union chief at the Škoda works in Pilsen in the 1980s, who liked to joke at meetings and got jokes from workers in return. The other is about Alois Indra, a member of the presidium of the Communist Party's Central Committee, who woke up a dozing hall in Pilsen with a joke about the labor shortage in the national economy.

The author then turns to the present. In his view, today's “new bosses” no longer hide behind the working class, but the spirit of that time has returned. He writes that lawmaker Ševčík held a Communist Party card, and that before 1989 communist military intelligence described him in surviving documents as enterprising, hard-working, principled and conscientious.

The author believes the coalition has seen a revival of the spirit, and sometimes of the people, of the normalization era. But Communist Party membership and ties to intelligence are not required for that, he says: Milan Bednář, an adviser to the finance minister, was never a communist and speaks in a refined manner. The author cites words that a social media video clip attributes to the adviser: journalists supposedly have no right to write badly about the government. The columnist sees in them an echo of Jan Fojtík, the Central Committee secretary who, until November 1989, decided what journalists could and could not write.

The columnist ends with a sharp line that the “mob” is once again running the country.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz