No surprises at Civic Democrat 10th birthday party

ODS

Members of Vaclav Klaus’s Civic Democrats (ODS) met in Prague over the weekend to celebrate their tenth birthday. Sipping champagne in the turn-of-the-centre splendour of the Zofin ballroom, delegates were mulling over the successes and failures of the past decade, as well as looking in the their crystal balls for a glimpse of what the future has in store. My colleague Rob Cameron joins me in the studio now – presumably the delegates had a lot to look back on Rob?

ODS
Rob Cameron: Well, the Civic Democrats have certainly had an interesting ten years – they spent most of the 1990s as a senior partner in a centre-right coalition. Then came 1997 and the spectacular collapse of the Klaus government over a funding scandal in his party. They narrowly lost the 1998 early elections to Milos Zeman’s Social Democrats, and ended up signing a power-sharing deal called the Opposition Agreement to keep the minority Social Democrat cabinet in power.

Radio Prague's Ita Dungan: So they certainly had a lot to talk about. Did anything controversial come out of the weekend’s congress?

RC: Well, not really. There was a minor ripple caused by Civic Democrat deputy chairman, Petr Necas, who said there was a real division inside the party over the Opposition Agreement. Unfortunately I was unable to contact Mr Necas, but I did speak to his party colleague Miroslav Macek:

Miroslav Macek: I think that Petr Necas’s attitude to the Opposition Agreement is a minority attitude in the ODS, and it is especially his personal attitude, and so of course it is over-focused in his speech. You know the next elections will be in a year, and there is no other possibility than to keep the [existing] political situation [the same] until the elections.

RC: Party leader Vaclav Klaus promised that the Civic Democrats would win the elections in 2002. If they do, which do you think is more likely? - a coalition with the Social Democrats, or a coalition with the right-of-centre parties in the Four-Party Coalition?

MM:: After the elections we would like a coalition with right-wing parties of course, but everything depends on the results of the elections, it depends on the voters. It’s very difficult to say now what the result will be.

RC: Some people say that the Civic Democrats ARE Vaclav Klaus, that they one and the same: Vaclav Klaus is the ODS, and the ODS is Vaclav Klaus. Is that something you would agree with?

MM:: Yes and no. Of course Vaclav Klaus is a very strong party leader, a very long-time party leader, but we have a lot of politicians on the district level, on the regional level, so I think the network of ODS men in the regions is very strong and of course it is a base for future leaders.