Life is getting awfully confusing for your average Czech anti-system conspiracy theorist and bigot, as the aftermath of a murder in Brno last weekend illustrates. When a Ukrainian stabbed a Roma man at a tram stop, illiberal ranks found their heads spinning. Parts of Czech society are expert at blaming the Roma for the violence and discrimination that the minority suffers, but these days they’re desperate to prove the folly of taking in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. The latter urge seems to have won the day, as summed up by Senator Jana Zwyrtek Hamplova, who earlier this year called for the segregation of Roma children in schools. “The current government is making our country a dangerous place to live with the uncontrolled influx of people from the east,” she said. That means Roma groups organising a protest for this weekend could find themselves bemused to find extremist nationalist groups turning up to support them. And some may not be entirely hostile to the hatred they hope to spread. Violent incidents in which Roma attacked Ukrainians were reported earlier in the week. Officials and Roma activists – who note they’re fully experienced in how these things work – are wary of the potential for further provocation and conflict, and have warned against apportioning collective guilt. The government’s commissioner for Roma affairs urged the public “not to be provoked to violence based on misinformation from people who only want to escalate hatred and divide society”.
And the confusion doesn’t stop there. As war, inflation and migration helps to expand competition on the far reaches of the political spectrum, the more established radical-right players are circling the wagons. On Wednesday, the SPD – Czechia’s only far-right parliamentary party – signed a memorandum of cooperation with the non-parliamentary Trikolora. The union was sealed, so the pair said, with an eye on next year’s regional and Senate elections, as well as the EU vote. But really it illustrates that SPD leader Tomio Okamura, whose party polls at around 10 per cent, is worried about losing support to recently arrived upstarts on the “patriotic” scene, as they like to term it. The half-Japanese Okamura has been wary of engaging with the series of large anti-government protests over the last year, which have helped crowd his chosen part of the political spectrum. The latest of these demonstrations – which feature anti-system and pro-Russian narratives as well as complaints over the cost of living – have pushed former Trikolora member Jindrich Rajchl and his PRO party to the fore. At the same time, former PM Andrej Babis, whose ANO party is the largest in parliament, is also seeking to leech support from among the million or so voters that in 2021 voted for parties that did not make it into parliament. Okamura says the deal with Trikolora will form the base for consolidating the country’s “patriotic and conservative” forces. Given the bitter fragmentation that tends to dominate in that neighbourhood, a solid union seems unlikely.
US blocks Hungary arms deal; top publishing house lands in government-allied hands
In an unusually harsh rebuke, the US Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee this week blocked a $735-million arms deal to Hungary, putting pressure on the Orban government to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership. The top Republican on the committee, Senator James E. Risch, informed the Washington Post that Hungary must allow Sweden into NATO if it wants the arms package, which includes 24 HIMARS batteries and more than 100 rockets and pods along with associated parts and support. The announcement shows how US politicians on both sides of the aisle are growing increasingly impatient with the Hungarian government’s delay as July’s key NATO summit approaches. Hungarian officials have repeatedly accused Sweden of unfair criticism and said relations with Stockholm must improve before ratification, though it’s not clear exactly what they expect. There are suspicions Orban is doing this at the bidding of Turkey, which is the other NATO country blocking accession. Hungary’s Defence Ministry dismissed the US move, saying it was interested in buying the HIMARS two years ago, but received no answer from Washington and so dropped the idea.
Hungary’s governing Fidesz party continued its cultural crusade this week with Mathias Corvinus College (MCC), the government-close education institution, acquiring majority ownership of the country’s biggest publishing house. Libri is listed among the hundred most valuable Hungarian companies by Forbes worth 22.3 billion forints (67 million euros) and is estimated to control around 50 per cent of the book market in Hungary, including publishing and retail. Business news site G7 reported that Libri’s former majority owner was practically pressured into selling his stake to MCC, a method not entirely rare in business circles in today’s Hungary. Many now wonder whether the books published by Libri will take a “more conservative” turn and “sensitive” topics like LGBT rights or gender issues will disappear from the shelves. Authors, including some of Hungary’s best-selling names, are concerned, but so far only one writer, Eva Peterfy-Novak, has announced she will quit Libri. MCC, which has received several major state assets of late amounting to over a billion euros and is led by the PM’s political director Balazs Orban (no relation), has been minority owner of Libri since 2021. MCC, which calls itself a “knowledge centre” through its extracurricular activities, scholarships and “talent promotion” for “selected youth”, opened a Brussels office in November to strengthen its international presence and provide a wider platform for populists like Orban. It also recently bought a private university in Austria.
Caretaker blues; Slovakia abstains on EU migration vote
Slovakia’s caretaker government led by former central banker Ludovit Odor did not win a confidence vote on Thursday. Only 34 MPs of 136 present MPs voted for the technocratic government’s program of policies. Odor needed to win the majority of present MPs to preserve full powers of his interim cabinet. President Zuzana Caputova will officially have to remove the government from power, but is expected to ask the PM to run the country, albeit with restricted powers, until a new government can be formed after the early election in September. The cabinet’s “Program” consists of 28 pages laying out promises to support Ukraine, remain a pro-Western country, fight disinformation, invest in the military, help vulnerable groups, improve the condition of public finances, and maintain the drawing of EU money. The lost confidence vote came as no surprise to experts, nor to Odor himself.
Meanwhile, EU member states agreed on new asylum and migration laws last week, but Interior Minister Ivan Simko abstained from the vote. He initially planned to support the new regulations. However, several political parties, including Hlas and the Eurosceptic liberal SaS party, opposed his intended move. Slovakia along with its Central European neighbours have long rejected mandatory migrant quotas, and even though the latest agreement does not mention them, Slovak political parties think otherwise. The new mechanism is described as “mandatory solidarity with flexibility”. What member states agreed on last week is their negotiating position for further talks with the European Parliament. On June 15, Simko told the Slovak parliament that his ministry expects an increase in the number of refugees. In the past five months, 7,200 refugees, mostly from Syria, were recorded by the authorities.
Refugees become electoral fodder in Poland; no more dead pregnant women
PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced on Thursday the party’s intention to organise a referendum on whether Poles want to receive refugees as part of a new Europe-wide relocation scheme to be potentially implemented once the new EU migration pact is in place. According to those proposals, a country not wanting to accept refugees on its territory will instead contribute 20,000 euros yearly per rejected refugee. Poland has been opposing the proposal, arguing it has done enough by helping millions of Ukrainian refugees since the war started, a million of whom continue to live in Poland. Kaczynski also said the referendum would take place on the same day as parliamentary elections this autumn, leading observers to comment that the PiS leader intends to exploit negative feelings towards the Ukrainians as a way to generate votes, a formula that has worked in the past for the party, contributing to its 2015 victory.
Thousands of women protested on Wednesday evening in about 70 locations across Poland, after another woman died after doctors in the hospital delayed performing an abortion to prolong the life of the foetus despite the mother’s life being at risk. The 33-year-old Dorota died on May 23 in a hospital in Nowy Targ, after coming to the ER when her waters broke prematurely. According to the husband, instead of informing the family that the foetus had hardly any chance of surviving, the medical staff told Dorota to lie on her back with her legs propped up, as this would help the waters “return”. After three days, the woman developed sepsis and died. There are at least five known cases of women dying in similar circumstances since the Polish constitutional court banned in 2020 abortions even in cases where the foetus was compromised. Many say the ruling has had a chilling effect on doctors, who are more afraid now to risk performing abortions. Women’s rights activists, however, have pointed out that abortions when the mother’s life is at stake are still legal and have called on doctors to act more bravely and responsibly.
In a key ruling on Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided that banks could not demand extra fees from customers for mortgage contracts that had been invalidated by courts. The ruling could impact tens of thousands of borrowers who took out mortgages in Swiss franc and whose monthly rates exploded over the past years for multiple reasons as the zloty has weakened. Borrowers have been challenging some aspects of the mortgage contracts in Polish courts – and usually winning. But some banks started demanding compensation for customers’ “non-contractual use of the capital borrowed” during the period of the contract, even if now invalidated. Once borrowers challenged these penalties, a Warsaw court asked the ECJ for an opinion. “Any annulment of the mortgage loan agreement is a consequence of the banks’ use of unfair terms,” the ECJ said in the ruling. “Therefore, it can neither be accepted that the bank derives economic advantages from its unlawful conduct, nor that it be compensated for the disadvantages caused by such conduct.”
