Viktorie Voriskova
October
From Sept. 9 to 15, 2024, sirens were going off across Eastern Europe. Evacuations, threatening news, panic spreading through countries like wildfire. What was happening? The biggest floods in the last 120 years spread across the Czech Republic, Poland and Austria. In the Czech Republic itself, the damage is estimated to be up to 17 billion Czech crowns (around 673 million euros). Metro stations flooded. A football stadium was completely underwater. Fifty-one thousand households were evacuated. Five people died. The Czech Republic went through the worst flooding in its history. And a week after that, the state faced another challenge—regional and senate elections which had only 33% public participation. A populist party that had led the government three years ago won in almost every region, in some by almost 20%. Is it possible that these results were impacted by the extreme floods that had taken place?
All political parties tried to catch voters’ attention by reacting to this crisis, either criticizing the government or organizing aid. The party that had posted the most about this crisis is “ANO”, a center populist political party that led the governing coalition three years ago, now in the opposition. Most of their content and program, on and off social media, is centered around criticizing the government’s “failures” and trying to convince voters that they were better off with ANO as the leading coalition, not the current government. They made several X and Instagram posts, as well as multiple TV proclamations, concerning this issue, among them ones posted by the leader of ANO, Andrej Babiš, stating that: “Mr Prime Minister Fiala (ODS) cannot stop lying. He lied about the aid from Brussels that we were supposed to get help with the floods. Last week, before the regional elections, he claimed that we would get 50 billion crowns (1,975 billion euros) from the Cohesiveness Fund. That is a lie; we will not get anything like this, and there will be no more money. We can use the money that we already have, but it will be missing somewhere else. Thank you, Prime Minister, for not doing anything for the Czech Republic yet again.”
The party leader then followed up this point by re-posting his tweet, stating that he “wishes the best of luck to all of those affected by the flooding”. He went on to say that he has lived through the previous floods that have affected the Czech Republic, showing solidarity with people who were suffering and ending by stating that he and his party (ANO) are ready to go out and help everyone who is affected by this crisis. In other posts on his social media, he criticized the government further, claiming over and over that it is incompetent and that it has done very little to support the people during these two weeks. There is seldom any concrete evidence for what he is criticizing the Prime Minister for, never drawing from any statistics and making false claims.
Another Czech political party that used the floods across the Czech Republic to spread its political ideas were the SPD—the “Liberty and Direct Democracy” party that is on the authoritarian right side of the spectrum—made multiple posts on Instagram X and several TV declarations, commenting on this crisis and blaming the current government. In one of the most liked ones, the leader of SPD, Tomio Okamura, called out the government for: “decreasing pensions, increasing the age limit for retirement and increasing the commission fees of the ČT [Czech Television—national TV channel] while SPD [his political party] is supporting aid against floods.” As the leader of ANO, Tomio Okamura also does not provide any evidence for his claim, making blatant statements without supporting them without any real statistics. SPD’s social media was considerably less focused on the floods than ANO was. However, there were still several posts made throughout the crisis that mentioned the floods, mostly concerning the failures of the government in their handling of them.
The third opposition party that has been active on social media during this crisis was the “KSČM” – Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. They made several posts, both on Instagram and X, as well as numerous TV proclamations, most of them based on their new slogan: “Stačilo!” (Enough!)—claiming that the republic has seen “enough” of the government’s incompetence, not only in dealing with the floods. They go on to reinforce the idea that the government is failing the people and that they are not doing enough, circling their arguments back to how the KSČ would make sure that people in the Czech Republic would be treated better than under the current leadership.
How did this all affect the result of the elections? ANO won 35.4%, increasing their influence by almost 14% compared to the previous elections, which were held in 2020. Second, by a considerable margin, came ODS, theCitizens’ Democratic Party, which received 5.9%, dropping by almost a percentage compared to the last elections. SPD received 3.3%, getting 18 mandates in total. Lastly, the coalition of KSČ was voted by 1.4% of the Czech population.
ANO, which won the elections by a very large margin, is a populist party. However, it cannot be defined as an “extremist party”, countering the argument that the floods had led to the triumph of extremism in the Czech Republic. On the other hand, both KSČ and SPD can be seen as such, therefore, an analysis of how the extreme situation in the form of floods affected the support these two parties received during the elections. Comparing the number of votes each party was predicted to receive even before the floods started to the number of votes they received after the floods provides reliable evidence as to how significantly this extreme event influenced.
In February 2024, according to “STEM analytics”, ANO was predicted to receive 29.3% of votes, 8.5% would have voted for ODS, for SPD it was 6.4% and KSČ would have been supported by 3.5% of voters. 22.3% of people who were asked chose to answer, “I don’t know”, 7.8% said “a different answer,” and 0.6% stated that they would vote for “a different party.” Now, we can compare this to the predictor polls that were taken in mid-September during the floods. 32% of voters would then have chosen ANO and 20% the coalition SPOLU, consisting of the parties ODS, TOP-09 and KDU-ČSL. SPD would have received 7% and KSČ 5%.
In conclusion, if we compare these statistics with the real results of the elections, we can see that there has not been a significant rise in the popularity of extremist parties caused by the floods. The party that had won the elections was an opposition party. However, it was not an extremist party, therefore not being entirely relevant to the premise of this article. Both extremist parties analysed in this article ended up with a relatively small number of votes, both receiving less than what was predicted they would receive. Furthermore, it is also important to recognize the fact that only 32% of the population voted in the elections in the end, not only making the election one of the lowest ever in regards to participation rate, but also skewing the relevance of the vote itself. To summarize, despite the results not being relevant to the real increase of extremism within society due to the very small percentage of people who turned up at the voting poll, there has not been a significant rise in extremism. Even though the opposition party largely bases itself off on criticism, the leading coalition did get more votes than predicted, showing a certain degree of frustration with the current government of the Czech Republic and a desire for change, although not a direct turn to extremism.