Perhaps a first crack in the impregnable “Visegrad”: the pro-European government of the Czech Republic takes over the presidency of the EU and deserves to be supported, comments Yannis Papadimitriou.
And yet, there are Eastern Europeans, who are …pro-Europeans. And not only do they exist, but they also hold the rotating presidency of the EU. “Europe as a duty” is the slogan of the Czech presidency for the second half of 2022. The saying refers to the great European Vaclav Havel, the last president of the united Czechoslovakia.
The associations with the “Prague Spring”, the experiment of a “socialism with a human face” that were crushed by Soviet tanks within a few months, are reasonable and timely. With the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. Even with the “velvet divorce” of Czechs and Slovaks, a rare act of political civilization in times of nationalist paroxysms, in the early 90s.
And yet, after the initial enthusiasm for the fulfillment of the historical debt and the reunification of Europe, the pendulum of history began to swing in another direction. Not only in the Czech Republic. The Visegrad group installed its own “state within a state” in the heart of Europe, starting with the emphatic support of the American war in Iraq (and indeed with a written declaration, in the absence of most Western Europeans) and ending with complete indifference to a substantial European solution to refugee issue. In the meantime, Visegrad had recorded a series of strange political results, such as the alliance of social democrats and nationalists in Slovakia, the omnipotence of the ethno-populist “Law and Justice” (PiS) party in Poland, the Hungarian ethno-populist Viktor Orbán who hates Europe – but not its generous subsidies – and “Czech Berlusconi” Andrei Babis.
Crack in “impregnable” Visegrad?
The first (and rather unexpected) major defeat for the populists in Eastern Europe was the failure of Babis to be re-elected prime minister in the Czech parliamentary elections last October. In record time, the new government of the conservative Petr Fiala prepared the country for the presidency of the EU, a process that Babis considered rather unnecessary. For the first time in ten years, the Czech Republic got a minister of European Affairs. Today Prime Minister Fiala states that his “priority is the restoration of unity” in Europe, while 80% of Czechs now consider EU membership “positive”, according to the latest “Eurobarometer”. But the populists are lurking, after all, Babis’ party has emerged as the first political force in the 2021 elections.
This Czech government deserves to succeed at a critical juncture. To complete the first major blow to the ethno-populists. But also to justify the legacy of the great European Vaclav Havel. Who honored his homeland, but at the same time glorified Europe, “the homeland of all our homelands”, as he said.
Giannis Papadimitriou
Source: Deutsche Welle
Source: Capital

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