With the lead-up to the EU parliamentary elections going through this weekend, I thought it appropriate to talk about some of the more…interesting aspects of the Czech political scene this year. They don’t quite have the panache of Sweden’s Pirate Party, but they do have one attention grabber: egg-throwing, and LOTS of it.
Plastered all over the city, it’s not too hard to come across the many different posters talking about different candidates for both Czech and EU elections; last Sunday we even came across a politician campaigning on Wenceslas Square that looked like something straight out of an Arkansas History book. The man was literally working out the back of his old, beat up pickup truck that was laden with signs championing the Czech Republic, the EU, and even the US for some reason (my friends told me he was actually a big proponent of America’s missile defense system…). The big kicker was the music that he had playing; you’d think that it would be something patriotic or an homage to the country’s heritage, but not quite; I kid you not, he had the song “American Pie” (dubbed in Czech, of course) blaring over the loudspeakers set up in the back of his truck…it was surreal, to say the least.
EU candidate on the stump...he was playing a Czech version of "American Pie"
Other than that up-close encounter, most of what I know about the upcoming elections comes from some rather interesting articles from the Associated Press and CNN. With turnout approaching the level of most US presidential elections (see, Europeans aren’t all that different from us…), experts are expecting that there could be an interesting shift to the right since the most likely to vote are those more on the extreme ends of the political spectrum…which is prompting HUGE European-style Rock the Vote campaigns, which if I understood the language better I would be studying like crazy…
For more on that, CNN has a great Question and Answer article about the EU election cycle, and there’s also a great analysis about the potential for Europe’s right-wing swing this time around. And speaking of Europe’s potential troubles, STRATFOR (a big thank you to Fred Burton for introducing me to this site) has a great ongoing series about the potential rise in European xenophobia (again, Americans aren’t exactly immune to this either).
But back to the egg-throwing attention-getter. It turns out that one of the Czech politicians running for office, Jiri Paroubek of the Social Democrats, is none too popular with the Czech majority. Several weeks ago, a young protester hurled several eggs at him at an election rally, and since then it has gone downhill for Paroubek; egg-throwing at rallies for his party have reached something of a fad for the population, prompting Paroubek to actually call for police protection (add tasers to the mix like they’ve brought out in American rallies, and it would make for an award-winning Youtube video).
The AP has a great article outlining the whole history of Paroubek’s egging, and there should also be some links there to actual video of it too; it makes for some interesting viewing, I have to say.
EDIT: Since finishing this I came across another blog post that gave a native Czech’s (or an expat with a long history here) opinion on the issue here.
