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Wednesday, March 8, 2000
The red and the righteous Maligned as a retirees' party, Czech Communists begin uphill battle to woo youth vote By Dennis Moran Long perceived as little more than a repository for roadside discontent, the resurgent Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) is eagerly seeking out the one ingredient that might put it on the road to cosmopolitan legitimacy: the youth vote. Which makes Benesova and Hurta rare and precious commodities. Despite the party's significant inroads in national polls, young believers willing to speak their mind and perhaps cast a Com-munist vote have been scarce. "This government will probably remain because there is no alternative in sight, but the future won't be better," Benesova says. "I'm sure I won't have a job when I finish gymnazium [high school]." At 18, Prague resident Benesova is hardly a bitter retiree. Nor is Hurta, a 19-year-old from Ostrava. Both are attending a Communist Youth Union weekend study session where The Communist Manifesto is required reading. Open to the public, the meetings are held about four times a year by the union, an adjunct of the KSCM. Though the Communist Party platform for the 1998 parliamentary elections included a plank calling for measures against the "Americanization" of Czech culture, Hurta seems unworried by cultural imperialism. He wears a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. "I don't think there is any threat," says Hurta, dismissing concerns about the loss of national identity. "The culture here is very strong. And why should we isolate ourselves?" Does he not worry about communism's tyrannical past? "The same thing would not be able to happen twice." The gray revolution So far, the KSCM's popularity surge -- fed by disgust and despondency toward the current government -- has been mostly a gray revolution, its numbers rising with age. Though attracting youth to the Party is seen by many as a tall order, Communist Youth Union organizers predict that their message will catch on. "I think for young people this is a sort of path as they continue to sober up from the November [1989] euphoria," says Josef Gottwald, 29, Youth Union chairman. "Today they are finding out that after university, for example, they cannot work in their fields. And they can't afford an apartment, and they can't afford a family, because the economic situation in our country is in a huge crisis now." A February poll by the research agency STEM put the KSCM second to the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), 21.6 percent to 17.9 percent, but among 18- to 29-year-olds the KSCM managed only 7.9 percent support. At the other end, 34.2 percent of those 60 and over said they support the KSCM. The party's overall numbers are down slightly from a late-1999 STEM poll that gave it 20.4 percent overall. The Communist Youth Union was born 10 years ago, not long after the revolution. The weakness of the new system was apparent to some youths even then, Gottwald says. It was hardly democratic, he argues, when government dissolved Czechoslovakia, and when the Czech Republic joined NATO without holding a popular referendum. Czech voters who turned to the Social Democratic Party (CSSD) in the last parliamentary elections in June 1998 now find themselves betrayed by that party's deepening nod to the right-wing Civic Democrats. But the KSCM must reckon with its own ideological contradictions. The Party still pledges allegiance to socialism, but officials say it is also committed to democracy and a combination of private enterprise, collective cooperatives and state-run firms. At the same time, however, it has little patience for Czech membership in NATO and looks upon membership in the European Union with disdain. Fraud and privatization Much rides on semantics. While the Communists sound very much like socialists, they insist they're somehow more reasonable than they were in their Cold War pariah days. "It's not true what people say about us -- that if we gain power, we would take property from people as in 1948," says Vlastimil Balin, KSCM first deputy chairman. "We openly say we want a change in the system, heading toward socialism. But not in the total form as we had before 1989." Privatization has occurred too fast, he says. It hasn't been thought through or properly regulated, leading to fraud and lost jobs. As if to build a feasible bridge between past and present, Youth Union leader Gottwald admits the pre-1989 regime would have benefited from a small private sector -- "the services were really bad," he says. But now, he adds, "we're getting into the situation that small and mid-sized entrepreneurs cannot survive in the current conditions." Small private farms, he argues, are simply not faring as well as the former collectives. Gottwald, like many European Communists, tries to spin the collapse of communism into a cleansing, or would-be rebirth. "It's a paradox," he says, "but 1989 did bring positive changes to the Communist Party. Those who were there just for their own benefit left the party, and some of them went right from the Communist Party to the right-wing parties. Today's KSCM is supported by people who do care about the social welfare." Petr Pracny, 32, a laid-off coal miner from Most and a Communist Party supporter, is a different kind of youth. "Things might not have been working 100 percent OK before the revolution, but the army was subsidized, agriculture was subsidized, highways were being built, housing was being taken care of, health care and everything," he says. Though a nominal Party member before the 1989 revolution, his conviction didn't deepen until later. "After the revolution, I started inclining toward the Communist Party because I used to have social benefits such as the right to work, and other social benefits such as free health care, and now I don't." North Bohemia's Most district, home to downsizing giants Chemopetrol Litvinov and the Mostecka uhelna spolecnost mining company, suffers from the country's highest unemployment rate -- 20.47 percent in January. A true believer "I was the first unemployed person in Most," local Communist Party official Jiri Kurcin says. An office worker for the district government office, the 50-year-old says he was fired in 1990 for refusing to renounce his Communist Party membership. "I was pushed away by Communists who had been in the party longer than I, and in higher posts. They told me, 'Throw your ID away and we'll find you something.' And I said, 'I'd rather be a doorman than throw away my ID, my communist past.' " Ironically, he's now an entrepreneur, operating a small shop in Most. But he's still a true believer. Most people were doing well under the old system, he says: production was better and industry had a plan -- a five-year plan. "If you ask the miners [now] how much coal will be mined in five years, no one knows. At least then people knew what was going to happen in five years." Disillusion grew, he added, as corruption plagued privatization efforts and foreign firms were permitted to buy too many strategic companies. "We have to stand on our own feet," Kurcin concludes. "We are in the situation where most of the big businesses are in foreign hands. We are becoming a semi-colony, because the decisions on how the industries are going to continue working are basically being decided out of the Czech Republic." Dennis Moran can be reached at news@praguepost.cz The Prague Post's reporting and research staff contributed to this report.
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