Professor and senator Bárta: Czech elites are out of touch

Czech senator, archaeologist and Egyptologist Professor Miroslav Bárta has said that the political and economic elites of Czechia and the European Union have become disconnected from most of society and do not understand how ordinary people live. According to him, servicing the state debt next year will consume almost 130 billion crowns, even as funding for science and higher education continues to shrink.

Budget deficit and science

Bárta reacted with irony to news of a three-billion-crown cut in the budget deficit, calling it a negligible trifle. He says he wouldn't have minded if that money had gone to defence or education, but instead the state keeps spending more on benefits, allowances and its own upkeep than on investment. He doesn't consider himself an economist, but points out that any debt has to be serviced — next year that will cost almost 130 billion crowns, enough to pay for new kilometres of motorway, better national security and education development. In Bárta's view, the idea of a welfare state is good in itself, but today it has grown so large that the country faces a painful “recovery” reform that will also touch pensions.

He also lamented the cuts to funding for universities, science and research, calling an educated society one of the main pillars of democracy. According to Bárta, the quality of democracy is determined not by a narrow layer at the top but by the majority of the population, which is why it matters to raise the general level of education — schools above all. On 15 October, the sequel to the collective monograph “At the Turning Point II” is being published, the work of 26 authors; Bárta wrote a lengthy chapter for it on the decline of democracy, which he believes is directly linked to years of underfunding of education, science and research — a trend, he stresses, that has nothing to do with the current government.

Billionaires, science and philosophy

Turning to positive news, Bárta mentioned the awards ceremony and the announcement of a new expedition by the Neuron Foundation, which supports young scientists: the event brought together several billionaires — Kučera, Dědek, Dospiva and Dejčmar — who put significant money into science and philanthropy more broadly. At the same time, he admitted that the foundation's prizes don't change the overall state of society. Comparing the European and American intellectual climate, Bárta praised the engagement of American tech leaders: Palantir founder Alex Karp, who holds a PhD in philosophy from Frankfurt am Main, openly states his views on society and wrote the book The Technologic Republic, which drew worldwide attention. According to Bárta, among Czech entrepreneurs, only Vašek Dejčmar seems willing to take a similar step, as he is now preparing his own book.

Bárta recalled that Oxford named its oldest chair in moral philosophy in honour of developer Luděk Sekyra, after Sekyra donated 100 million crowns to the university. Bárta himself founded the Institute for the Study of Civilisations and Democracy fifteen years ago; physicist Dana Drábová was involved in its work, and after her death he decided to see the project through and turn the institute into a proper think tank — partly at the urging of Vašek Dejčmar, who spent a year persuading him to record a podcast commenting on world events.

A divided society and Senate reform

Bárta describes the book At the Turning Point, written ten years ago with co-authors Martin Kovář and Otakar Foltýn, as having predicted the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine — which, he says, explains the strong interest in the book at auctions today. As a senator, Bárta is working with a team of lawyers on a bill that would define the concept of “state interest.” He considers it a serious mistake in the design of the Senate that the lower house of parliament can override a veto from the upper house or the president on almost any issue — unlike, for example, the United States, where a law must be approved by both chambers. Because of this, Bárta says, the social contract in the country has effectively broken down: no one is obliged to negotiate, and society is so divided that it is unable to reach agreement on almost any important issue. His proposed solution is a constitutional amendment requiring both chambers to reconcile legislation with each other.

Asked what constitutes Czechia's state interest today, in the autumn of 2026, Bárta named belonging to the West and defending democracy, which is weakening around the world. In November the Senate will hold public hearings on the problem of the declining birth rate. Bárta is convinced there is no single simple fix — such as tax breaks or allowances for large families: in his observation, the more state subsidies there are, the lower the birth rate, because people have grown used to expecting the state to solve their problems rather than the family, as was the case for nearly all of human history. Subsidies, he believes, should only be used where they are truly necessary, and above all people need to learn to rely on themselves and their loved ones.

Elites, the EU and artificial intelligence

In his 2021 book Seven Laws, Bárta compared the Western world to the Titanic: passengers on the lower decks shout that water is coming into the hold, while up in first class people keep dancing as if nothing were wrong. In his words, the elites have become completely disconnected from most of society and have no idea what is really happening or what people are thinking — otherwise European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen could not have delivered her recent State of the Union address the way she did: in Bárta's assessment, it contained not a single concrete step, only talk of concepts and strategies, and by the time those materialise, industry in Europe risks disappearing.

Bárta believes Europe has itself destroyed a large share of its own manufacturing and raw-material extraction, driven up energy prices, and must now start almost from scratch — while a single European financial and capital market has still never got off the ground, which is why capital and business keep moving to the United States. Describing himself as a committed supporter of the European Union idea, Bárta nonetheless wryly compares Brussels' current policy to trying to teach a donkey to run like a horse, “even if the donkey insists it is a horse,” and calls what is happening sheer madness.

A separate topic is artificial intelligence, which, according to a number of experts — including the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic — is already something to be wary of. Bárta co-authored an exhibition and publication on AI, created with support from the energy company ČEZ as part of its long-running “energy and civilisation” and “water and civilisation” project series. He urges great caution in developing the technology, but doesn't rule out that, at best, artificial intelligence could help humanity defeat new diseases and solve complex mathematical problems. For himself, Bárta names preserving democracy as the top priority — the only system that gives people a more or less equal start in life; he says artificial intelligence could help smooth out inequality in access to quality education between different regions of Czechia, by letting children work out on their own what they didn't understand in class. At the same time, he stresses: “Artificial intelligence is our product, not our master,” and that responsibility for knowing how to frame questions properly and work with facts lies with schools and families, not with technology. Skeptical of the idea of bans, Bárta points out that Mein Kampf has never been banned in the United States — people there were left free to form their own opinion — whereas in the European Union, where the book is banned, the population is radicalising noticeably more.

Miroslav Bárta was born on 25 December 1969 in Prague. He studied archaeology at Charles University and Egyptology in Hamburg, and since 2011 has led archaeological research at Abusir in Egypt. From 2013 to 2019 he headed the Czech Institute of Egyptology; in 2019 he received the government's national Czech Head award and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Two years ago he was elected senator for the Prague 2 district as an independent candidate backed by the STAN and TOP 09 parties.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by denik.cz