At first blush, Vladimir Spidla, the new leader of the ruling Social Democrats (CSSD), seems like the perfect target for detractors who say he is bookish and mild-mannered, a man more suited to walking the stuffy halls of academia than those of Parliament.

Yet speak to him at length and another Spidla emerges -- a confident, witty, refined man who soon could be in the running for the job of prime minister.

Asked about comparisons with his often-confrontational predecessor as party leader, Prime Minister Milos Zeman, Spidla betrays just the right amount of vanity.

"You don't get into a top position in a democracy," he said, "without having personality."

Spidla compared the two men to chess strategists with differing styles. "I am a positional player and he is an offensive player. In the beginning of a game of chess, the odds are in favor of the offensive players. In the difficult times, as we have currently, the odds are in favor of the positional ones."

For Spidla, that means he has the game in hand.

During an interview conducted only hours after his trusted deputy, Jiri Rusnok, was named the country's new finance minister, Spidla spoke passionately of his belief in the welfare state and the future of social democracy in Europe.

He blasted those who say social democracy is outmoded, pointing to successes in France and elsewhere. He worried over the growing clout of multinational corporations and took the United States to task for shirking its environmental responsibilities. He predicted that the country's most popular political grouping, the Quad Coalition, would collapse before next year's national elections and that his party would fare better than polls currently suggest.

Handpicked by Zeman, the 49-year-old historian ran unopposed for the party's top spot at a party congress in Prague earlier this month. His task is to revive the faltering CSSD -- it has less than a 15 percent stake in the polls -- and make it a winner by 2002.

The CSSD has been weakened by the unpopular "opposition agreement," an unusual arrangement that permits the Social Democrats to rule in exchange for policy concessions to the conservative Civic Democrats (ODS). The Social Democrats trail the ODS and the center-right Quad Coalition by up to 10 points in opinion polls.

Spidla struck a defiant note in his acceptance speech, proclaiming his firm belief in "a socialist state" and attacking his enemies on the right, saying all they offered voters were "hazy notions of a society with sharp social differences and within which power is only for the powerful."

He was heard. The left-leaning Prague daily Pravo praised Spidla for demonstrating that the CSSD was a party of the left. But the country's most prominent daily, Mlada fronta Dnes, worried about the economic overtones.

So did some business leaders.

"I don't think Mr. Spidla thinks very much of the business community," said Weston Stacey, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce. "I think he has a very misplaced suspicion of [it]."

Stacey isn't sure whether Spidla's comments are aimed at voters or genuinely reflect policy.

"I'm not sure that if he wins the election, he would be able to fulfill his promises without seriously compromising the country's economic and social future," Stacey said.

Spidla, however, pulls no punches when it comes to the growing power of multinational corporations. "There is a lot of power concentrated in multinational corporations and it is the power of oligarchies, not of democracies," he said. "It's not about direct political influence. ... Say, for example, that Volkswagen decided to pull the Skoda company out of the Czech Republic; then this purely economic decision would have significant political consequences."

He also emphasized that economic prosperity and social justice are not mutually exclusive, noting that France and Germany, both run by Social Democratic governments, have balanced the two.

"It is not very well-known that France, for example, has the highest level of hourly productivity in the world, higher than the United States," Spidla said.

Spidla, considered a moderate by some of his party's left wing, said he identified more closely with the social democratic governments of French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder than the "new socialists" of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party.

He dismissed attacks on his government's fiscal policy, in particular the country's growing budget deficit, which reached 3.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) last year. The ODS, the Quads and even the World Bank have criticized the deficit.

"It is necessary to deal with this in a sensible way, but there is no crisis," he said. "We are still a transition economy, we are in a state of reconstruction similar to that after the Civil War in the United States."


Kyoto anger
Modernization and economic growth, he said, will fix the deficit. The economy grew by 2.7 percent last year and Spidla said 4 percent growth is enough to balance the budget. He also noted that the country's debt-to-GDP ratio is lower than in all but a handful of the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Spidla also labeled criticism of the nation's tax rate as exaggerated. "The general [income] tax level is about 43 or 44 percent, which is slightly under the average level [in the OECD]," he said. "The level of taxes is just about acceptable."

Tax critics have also gone after Spidla himself, who as the labor and social affairs minister has resisted a funds-based pension system to replace the current pay-as-you-go fund. Detractors say it will soon be unsustainable because as the country's working population ages, fewer taxpayers will be able to contribute to the system.

He admitted pension reform is "an important issue," but again rebuked those who say it is a crisis.

"The aging of the population cannot be a problem in a world which, in general, is getting younger," he said, pointing out that with an average population growth of only about 3 percent over 30 years, pension-fund contributions would actually go down while maintaining current benefits.

He said relations with the United States were unlikely to change substantially under President George W. Bush, but was quick to criticize the Republican president's decision not to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change, a move that has been widely condemned.

"The Kyoto protocol is a problem," Spidla said, adding that the United States is not living up to its responsibilities when it comes to global warming.

He also said he believes it's only logical for the country to move closer to Europe, even if that means distancing itself from the United States.

"Europe is our immediate neighbor, we are part of its cultural and political environment," he said. "It is closer to us, its culture and history definitely have more influence than that of the United States."

Spidla said he believes the country will be ready to join the European Union in time for the union's 2004 parliamentary elections. But he does not consider it a given that the Czech Republic will be among those nations accepted in the next wave of enlargement.

"Much is uncertain. It is not like planning grocery shopping for next week," he said.

EU membership could be placed in doubt, for example, if the ODS, considered the more "Euro-skeptic" of the nation's main parties, fares well in the next elections.

Public vs. private Incoming Social Democratic Party (CSSD) Deputy Chairwoman Marie Souckova and new party leader Vladimir Spidla are at odds over whether to make insider meetings open to public scrutiny. Souckova, who is charged with improving the party's public and media image, suggested that central committee meetings and lower-level meetings should be conducted openly. Spidla disagreed. "I don't know how you would lead a discussion on things [the way] things are ... complicated, on [public] stages, hemmed in by a lot of microphones." He said that such conditions would hamper discussion.

Spidla is confident that his party, a leading proponent of EU membership, will do better than its current poll numbers.

"I assume we are going to win at the polls," he said. With a majority victory unlikely by any party, the CSSD will probably need to form a coalition government.

Spidla said he is willing to consider negotiating with both the ODS and the Quads, although he suspects that won't be necessary.

"I don't expect the [Quads] to last until the election," he said, which would open the door to negotiating with one of the coalition's components. The Christian Democrats, which along with the Freedom Union are the dominant players in the coalition, are considered his most likely partners.

Spidla said working with the Communist Party, as some in the left wing of his party have suggested, is out of the question.

Before the Velvet Revolution, Spidla refused to join the Communists and was something of an outcast. He was a manual laborer -- working as a stagehand or boiler stoker, for example -- as well as an archeologist and preservationist.

In 1989, he was a founding member of the Civic Forum movement in Ceske Budejovice, south Bohemia. While many of his Civic Forum colleagues adopted the mantra of small government and free-market capitalism after the revolution, Spidla veered left, founding the CSSD's South Bohemia chapter by putting an ad in the newspaper looking for co-founders.

"Politics is not rational," he concluded. "It's about personal value systems."



-- Vojtech Saman contributed to this report.


Michael Mainville's e-mail address is mmainville@praguepost.cz