EU: Czechs Get Stacked Deck
By Jeremy Druker for ISN
With the end of the Czech presidency of the European Union last week, the evaluations have started to rain in. After a series of high-profile gaffs, the collective report card issued by the international media seems largely negative. But that is unfair.
First, the high-profile gaffs: One could start with the decision to commission a piece of controversial art (“Entropa”) to hang in one of the EU’s main buildings in Brussels. Not only was the sculpture a massive hoax, cooked up by a prankster named David Cerny, but it also parodied sensitive stereotypes of each of the EU’s member states.
Next came Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek’s ill-timed remark, calling US President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan “a road to hell” in a speech to the European Parliament. The comment, which came amid the EU’s attempts to form a general consensus on an economic approach before a G20 meeting, also hit the media just a week before Obama was due in Prague for an EU-US summit.
Too impulsive for his own good, Topolanek later explained that he might have been inspired to utter the “hell” reference after hearing AC/DC and their classic “Highway to Hell” during a recent Prague concert. More likely, he was still reeling from the no-confidence vote he had lost the day before in Parliament.
That ended up being the country’s biggest gaff by far and an embarrassment that no list of successes (more on that below) could help overcome. On 24 March, halfway through the presidency, an opposition-instigated vote ended in defeat for Topolanek’s center-right government.
Most people were at a loss to explain the motivations of Czech Social Democratic (CSSD) Chairman Jiri Paroubek, other than his intense dislike of Topolanek and wish to humiliate his rival during the presidency. Many thought Paroubek hadn’t really expected to gather the necessary votes among coalition rebels and/or that the Euroskeptic President Vaclav Klaus had connived to derail the government in order to delay the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.
Whatever its genesis, the move was rightly interpreted as yet another example of Czech politicians’ placing their narrow party interests above the interests of the country at large, or even Europe in this case. And with the appointment of a caretaker government, headed by the apolitical former chief of the country’s statistical office, the rest of the EU suddenly viewed the Czech presidency as dead in the water.
That was a pity, because, both publicly and behind the scenes, the Czechs were actually doing a fine job - despite facing a deck stacked against them (starting off in the shadow of the previous, frenetic French presidency and in the middle of the financial crisis). Prague was confronted almost immediately with the conflict in Gaza and the Ukraine-Russia gas dispute.
Instead of falling flat on their faces, the Czechs received praise for acting as skilled, impartial mediators in the gas affair, then fighting off protectionist impulses among some EU member states to reach a basic agreement on economic strategy, and securing at least some financing to continue development of the Nabucco pipeline to create an alternative energy source.
On the less flashy, but important side, Czech officials pushed home a long-delayed measure to reduce VAT for local services and another one that slashed mobile roaming prices.
In the final days of the presidency, the caretaker government managed to forge a deal with the Irish government that provided certain guarantees about the Lisbon Treaty, allowing another referendum to be called (no persuasion could, however, convince Klaus to sign the Lisbon Treaty, though both houses of parliament finally approved it).
All in all, give or take a misguided comment, Klaus’s anti-EU antics, and the fall of government, not a bad six months in office. As Jan Kohout, the foreign minister, noted in a commentary published on 8 July in The Prague Post, “Maybe the real lesson is that a 21st-century EU presidency needs to be extremely image-conscious.”
First, the high-profile gaffs: One could start with the decision to commission a piece of controversial art (“Entropa”) to hang in one of the EU’s main buildings in Brussels. Not only was the sculpture a massive hoax, cooked up by a prankster named David Cerny, but it also parodied sensitive stereotypes of each of the EU’s member states.
Next came Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek’s ill-timed remark, calling US President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan “a road to hell” in a speech to the European Parliament. The comment, which came amid the EU’s attempts to form a general consensus on an economic approach before a G20 meeting, also hit the media just a week before Obama was due in Prague for an EU-US summit.
Too impulsive for his own good, Topolanek later explained that he might have been inspired to utter the “hell” reference after hearing AC/DC and their classic “Highway to Hell” during a recent Prague concert. More likely, he was still reeling from the no-confidence vote he had lost the day before in Parliament.
That ended up being the country’s biggest gaff by far and an embarrassment that no list of successes (more on that below) could help overcome. On 24 March, halfway through the presidency, an opposition-instigated vote ended in defeat for Topolanek’s center-right government.
Most people were at a loss to explain the motivations of Czech Social Democratic (CSSD) Chairman Jiri Paroubek, other than his intense dislike of Topolanek and wish to humiliate his rival during the presidency. Many thought Paroubek hadn’t really expected to gather the necessary votes among coalition rebels and/or that the Euroskeptic President Vaclav Klaus had connived to derail the government in order to delay the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.
Whatever its genesis, the move was rightly interpreted as yet another example of Czech politicians’ placing their narrow party interests above the interests of the country at large, or even Europe in this case. And with the appointment of a caretaker government, headed by the apolitical former chief of the country’s statistical office, the rest of the EU suddenly viewed the Czech presidency as dead in the water.
That was a pity, because, both publicly and behind the scenes, the Czechs were actually doing a fine job - despite facing a deck stacked against them (starting off in the shadow of the previous, frenetic French presidency and in the middle of the financial crisis). Prague was confronted almost immediately with the conflict in Gaza and the Ukraine-Russia gas dispute.
Instead of falling flat on their faces, the Czechs received praise for acting as skilled, impartial mediators in the gas affair, then fighting off protectionist impulses among some EU member states to reach a basic agreement on economic strategy, and securing at least some financing to continue development of the Nabucco pipeline to create an alternative energy source.
On the less flashy, but important side, Czech officials pushed home a long-delayed measure to reduce VAT for local services and another one that slashed mobile roaming prices.
In the final days of the presidency, the caretaker government managed to forge a deal with the Irish government that provided certain guarantees about the Lisbon Treaty, allowing another referendum to be called (no persuasion could, however, convince Klaus to sign the Lisbon Treaty, though both houses of parliament finally approved it).
All in all, give or take a misguided comment, Klaus’s anti-EU antics, and the fall of government, not a bad six months in office. As Jan Kohout, the foreign minister, noted in a commentary published on 8 July in The Prague Post, “Maybe the real lesson is that a 21st-century EU presidency needs to be extremely image-conscious.”