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Less than a month before the 10th anniversary of Vaclav Havel's "velvet revolution" and the fall of Czechoslovakia's socialist regime, the Communist Party in the Czech Republic (KSCM) led the field in the latest opinion poll on voting intentions.
Published on Thursday (Oct.21), the poll gave the KSCM 23 per cent voter support, a 3 per cent increase on September. It is the highest support ever recorded for the KSCM in the polls, and the first time they have been the front runner.
Ex-premier Vaclav Klaus's right-wing Civic Democrats (ODS) were placed second with 21 per cent, with the ruling Social Democrats of Prime Minister Milos Zeman third with 17.5 per cent. Two smaller right-wing parliamentary parties, the Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) and the ODS-breakaway Freedom Union (US), had 12 and 11 per cent support respectively, according to the Institute for Public Opinion Research (IVVM), one of the country's three main pollsters.
IVVM director Eliska Rendlova said that October's big advance in support for the KSCM was due to continued defections to the Communists by those who voted Social Democrat at the June 1998 general election and previously undecided voters declaring for the KSCM.
Support for the Communists, she said, was growing especially among Czechs who had completed a secondary education but left school without a school-leaving certificate, i.e. semi-skilled and unskilled workers. They, along with women and ethnic Romanies, have been the hardest-hit by post-1989 unemployment, now running officially at 9 per cent, and rising living costs.
The swing to the Communists has been gaining momentum since it first appeared as a definite trend at the start of this year. At last year's election the Communists polled 11 per cent, which gave them 24 seats in the 200-member Chamber of Deputies. According to IVVM, their current support would translate into 55 seats.
The leader of the Communist group in the Chamber 44-year-old lawyer Vojtech Filip told a press conference last week that the KSCM neither overvalued nor undervalued the poll, although it welcomed the results. He said that there were plenty of capable people among the KSCM's 150,000 members, experts in their fields, who could become government ministers "immediately". But if the other parliamentary parties continued to shun the KSCM, its only ally could be the voters.
Filip did not rule out the possibility of the KSCM deciding at its 5th Congress in December to consider contesting the next election in coalition with certain non-party civic associations, rather than on its own independent ticket.
Party chairman and deputy Miroslav Grebenicek, a 52-year-old former university history teacher, said he wasn't surprised by the party's growing influence, "because governments over the past ten years devastated the economy and broke up the (Czechoslovak) state, and the people are looking for a solution." ODS leader Vaclav Klaus said he could not believe that one in four Czechs would vote Communist, but nevertheless he stepped up his recently-launched campaign for the formation of a "super-grand coalition" government, arguing that if the polls were right, it was even more necessary than before.
The coalition would include all four anti-communist parliamentary parties, including the ruling Social Democrats. They formed a minority government in July 1998 with the support of the ODS in a "grand alliance" of the two biggest parliamentary parties, which has become increasingly unpopular with both SocDem and ODS voters and the Czech people as a whole for three reasons:
(1) they did not vote for it
(2) it has been blatantly used by SocDem and ODS leaders to grab lucrative state posts and to further their common interest in imposing a two-party system on the Czech Republic
(3) it has totally failed to deal with any of the economic and social problems besetting the people: rising unemployment, redundancies, non-payment of wages, rising crime, widespread corruption, the housing shortage and health care and education charges.
Now that the "grand alliance" has completely lost its credibility, the ODS wants to replace it, unlike the SocDems who want it "deepened". And the Christian Democrats and Freedom Union are not anxious to be swallowed up in a government dominated by the ODS and the SocDems.
However, President Havel, was so "impressed" by the level of support for the KSCM in the polls that last week he apparently abandoned his previous support for the Christian Democrats and Freedom Union and called on the anti-communist parties to stop their "coquetry and games" and come up with a common programme to blunt the KSCM's advance.