The Czech Republic is a very white country. The fact that only two candidates of color will matter in the Parliament elected last week, is not surprising as such. But their presence says much about the nature of the anger that too many Czech voters, like other Europeans and Americans, channeled into electing unhinged racists, Islamophobes, and demagogues. The winner, ANO, is a new party whose name means “yes” but which is dedicated to saying “no” to everything: to the government, to the euro, and, of course, to migrants. Only a few of the smaller parties clearly reject the notion that no Muslims, or at most a very few, should be allowed into the country. Yet even in such an apparently racist climate, the star of two racialized politicians was allowed to rise.
One is Japanese-born Tomio Okamura, the founder of the most hatefully anti-Muslim parliamentary party of all. Though there are few Muslims in the country and even fewer who want to go there now, when Okamura wants to keep out all Muslims and forbid “sharia law,” he feels he is speaking up not only for his country but Europe. To critics who point to his non-European background, he replies that as a victim of racist taunting starting in kindergarten, he could not possibly be a racist.
Dominik Feri is his exact opposite. The part-Ethiopian lawmaker (pictured above) will represent TOP 09, an old-style party with humanist, pro-EU values outspokenly opposed to the anti-migrant moral panic that has swept the country and the continent. True, TOP 09 just barely squeezed into the new Parliament, while Okamura’s SPD finished second. But Feri has all the future ahead of him: At 21 years of age, he will be the youngest parliamentarian in Czech history. Feri was the last on the proposed list of candidates for his party. However, election rules that allow voters to promote candidates on the list have catapulted him close to the quirky aristocrat, Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, and the party leader, Miroslav Kalousek. By all accounts, Feri owes his success to his able use of the social media, which has allowed him to build a base of supporters among the young.
The election of an anti-authoritarian, minority candidate, for what will be a parliament dominated by populists, provides a significant glimmer of hope that the Czech polity can protect its respectable democratic roots during the coming populist winter.
But so does, perhaps, the election of the man at the opposite of the spectrum. It’s not surprising that antiracist voters have elected a non-white deputy like Feri. What is striking is that the avowedly racist “defenders of Europe” would let an Asian, Okamura, speak for them. I suggest that this fact is a key to their real emotions.
Like elsewhere in the world, in the Czech Republic the predominant affect of the voters is anger. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more” is an emotion that needs to find a target to blame for the unhappiness. It so happens that the Czech Republic is a country with a rising economy, an enviable budgetary surplus, the lowest unemployment in Europe, and a low degree of inequality between the rich and the poor. So what causes the grumbles? Are Czechs envious of their western neighbors, who are still far richer and still look down on them as poor “East European” cousins? Do they resent the glittering lives of some of the most fortunate among big-city denizens, which contrast with the tediousness of life in the drab post-socialist suburbs and the boring small towns? As for us academics, we like to point fingers at neoliberal capitalism and the inroads of western business as the culprit.
There is much truth in all of these contentions, but ultimately there is a new world out there and we don’t understand it. We don’t really understand the rage of the angry mass of voters.
They themselves don’t. They blame others: the elites, the politicians, the NGOs, and, especially, visibly different ethnic and religious communities. But perhaps, deep in their hearts (if they still have those), they understand that these are just scapegoats. There may be grounds for a smidgen of optimism in the fact that they’ll embrace, even follow, a non-white racist if he screems out his anger more angrily than they can. Could it be that what appeals to them is the anger more than the racism? If so, then perhaps they can still be talked to. At least, let’s hope so.
The Wellington Review 