Czech president Pavel skips the election he urged people to vote in

Czech President Petr Pavel failed to show up for the recent election, even though he had previously publicly urged citizens to make sure they went to the polls. His decision to skip the vote in the small municipality where he is registered as a resident has sparked three different reactions in Czech society — ranging from his opponents' gloating to his allies' attempts to dismiss the whole thing as an ordinary local story.

Three views on the president's actions

The first group of observers saw Pavel's absence from the polls as confirmation of their own view: if the president himself doesn't bother to vote, he never deserved the trust placed in him. The second group — Pavel's supporters — admits he made a mistake, since a head of state shouldn't put personal interest above civic duty, but their trust in him remains intact. The third group doesn't see the episode as a problem at all: in their view, it was merely a municipal election in a small community, and skipping it does nothing to diminish either Pavel's standing or their own loyalty to him.

Why the mistake isn't seen as a disaster

Moderate criticism of the president looks like a realistic assessment of the situation in Czechia: today the president and the Senate stand opposed to the Chamber of Deputies and the government, and there is effectively no other pillar for democratic forces besides the head of state and the upper house of parliament. At the same time, the new ‘normalizers’ — as supporters of an authoritarian course are called, by analogy with the past — still hold a numerical advantage. There won't be another president anytime soon: there's no sign yet that a better candidate than Petr Pavel will come to Prague Castle in the next election, so it makes more sense to work with what we have.

A ‘commander’ who cannot be criticized

The other two groups judging the president's conduct are more radical and live in an atmosphere of ‘cold civil war,’ expecting that sooner or later it will turn hot. For them, Petr Pavel isn't a politician but a commander: for some, he stands at the head of their own ‘army,’ and a commander isn't criticized; for others, he leads the enemy's army, which must be destroyed. As a politician, Petr Pavel made a mistake; as an ordinary citizen, few would care about him at all; but as a commander, he simply isn't accountable to his subordinates when it comes to criticism. The question remains whether he himself wants to be this kind of ‘commander’: in his public statements he addresses all of these groups of citizens at once, saying he defends certain principles, while carefully avoiding the fact that at least half of those he's addressing don't share those principles. How long he'll manage to dance between the raindrops remains to be seen.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz