The chairwoman of SOCDEM Jana Maláčová announced on Monday the termination of negotiations with the Stačilo! (Enough!) coalition regarding pre-election cooperation. In her statement on social media, she justified it as follows: “Time has unfortunately shown that the Stačilo! movement does not want to emphasise left-wing issues, but is built purely on an anti-system programme. The goal of social democracy is not to promise a completely unrealistic referendum on leaving the EU. Our goal is not to search for so-called foreign agents in Czech politics. Our goal is to substantially improve the lives of people in this country who suffer from expensive rents, expensive food or expensive energy.”

Eight months before the elections, a well-thought-out pre-election campaign should already be getting underway, and the party should not still be contemplating what it actually wants to be.

This was supposedly the cornerstone of the Czech version of the French New Popular Front – a pre-election programme built on left-wing economic prescriptions that should reduce inequalities in Czech society, improve the quality of life for most citizens, and protect the lower and middle strata of society from the economic impacts of major geopolitical changes. However, such a programme would require the will of both political partners, which did not happen. The Stačilo! coalition has evidently calculated that anti-system politics will open the door to Parliament (and perhaps even to government) and that it doesn’t need SOCDEM for this. Especially when Jana Maláčová was setting conditions such as the possibility of having their own parliamentary group.

Stačilo! against NGOs

Perhaps to make it clearer that an agreement would not be reached, the Stačilo! coalition held a press conference in January, at which Daniel Sterzik, also known as the controversial blogger “Vidlák” (Yokel), popular with the Czech conspiracy scene, appeared as one of the pre-election leaders. Instead of a clearly defined programme, Stačilo! offered vague promises of tax reform, a tough fight against migration and the Green Deal, and as dessert, far-right evergreens such as nationalising public television or fighting against foreign agents and NGOs.

If cultural issues were to be set aside in favour of a solid left-wing economic programme, Stačilo! was throwing one culture war grenade after another into the negotiations. It’s hard to imagine that most of the social democratic membership would have voted for cooperation with Stačilo! after this. In the current geopolitical situation and with Donald Trump in the White House, the Czech left is also playing for high stakes. There are not many political parties left in Czech politics that could at least intellectually oppose the far-right nationalism flourishing around the world. Through cooperation with Stačilo!, which is currently one of many Donald Trump political fan clubs in the Czech Republic, SOCDEM would probably end as an authentic political project of the European left.

For libtards and deplorables alike

It’s not worth reproaching Maláčová now for a futile attempt to arrange the broadest possible left-wing coalition. The effort to create a broader front against “impoverishing people,” as Maláčová herself describes this attempt, and for this purpose to overlook the contradictions between the Communist Party and SOCDEM, made sense under the circumstances. It wasn’t Maláčová who partnered with Trikolora’s sponsor, agribusiness baron Zdeněk Jandejsek, or spreader of pseudoscientific nonsense Petra Rédová Fajmonová. The alleged “anti-system” stance of the government’s opponents is based much more on fighting against climate protection and vaccination and on opposition to NGOs than, for example, on questioning private property. That is very difficult to do with billionaires at your back, however much you may still call yourselves “communists”.

The position of social democracy less than eight months before the elections to the Chamber of Deputies is unenviable. After eight years of coalition governance with Babiš’s ANO movement, the party narrowly failed to get into the Chamber in the last parliamentary elections in 2021 and has not been able to stop its decline since then. The party’s greatest success may thus be that it at least managed to remove Michal Šmarda from the position of chairman, who was originally supposed to save the party but became known mainly for his invisibility. The energetic Maláčová won the chairperson’s seat together with a mandate to negotiate the formation of a broad left-wing coalition following the model of the French New Popular Front.

The coalition seems inevitable. Pre-election polls attribute between 1.5 and 4 percent to social democracy – thus a slim hope of entering Parliament independently. After three years outside parliament, the party is searching for confidence and voice. The polarising rhetoric of both the government coalition and the opposition pushes social democracy into positions that are disadvantageous for it. In the eyes of some voters, SOCDEM is too systemic (when it does not reject NATO or membership in the European Union) and basically collaborates with a system that fails to ensure general prosperity and worsens the position of the disadvantaged in the long term. For others, social democracy is anti-system, as it was willing to support Andrej Babiš’s government. Social democracy must be a party for “libtards”, defending things like human rights and minority rights, but it must also be a party for “deplorables” and stand up for all who have trouble making ends meet from month to month.

However, the termination of negotiations with Stačilo! does not automatically mean that a progressive left-wing coalition of social democracy, the Green Party and smaller left-wing parties such as the Left or Future will now be formed. According to the SOCDEM leadership’s statement, cooperation with many entities is under negotiation, and we can only speculate about which ones are being discussed. Cooperation with Robert Šlachta’s Přísaha (Oath) is also possible, or with Jiří Paroubek’s Czech Sovereignty of Social Democracy (ČSSD), which recently snatched SOCDEM’s original acronym.

Jana Maláčová thus has another problem. The hinted possible collaborations are diametrically different and will largely determine what politics SOCDEM will actually represent in the election campaign. She must therefore quickly choose in order to start building a strong pre-election identity for social democracy under her leadership. Eight months before the elections, a well-thought-out pre-election campaign should already be slowly getting underway, and the party should not still be contemplating what it actually wants to be.

Jan Bělíček

Pavel Šplíchal

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