15.3.2006
Rightist coalition with the centrist Greens
After some months the Civic Democrats (ODS) are again leading the opinion polls
Irena Ryšánková
While the ruling Social Democrats’ (ČSSD) downward slide is in large part due to the short, sharp shock of Health Minister David Rath’s policy initiatives – the question of how to pay (or rather co-pay) for medicines, cutting pharmacists’ the profit margins – the ODS boat may have been lifted by a new wave of support for the Green Party (SZ). 
Simply put, ODS isn’t behaving like a winner. 
Published in Czech Business Weekly HERE	
Party chairman Mirek Topolánek disbanded the center-right party’s “shadow government” just when its rivals are nominating ministers-in-waiting, making their leadership visible and ready to explain their election programs. Topolánek himself is unable to do this, apart from giving general promises of a better future. 
In one glaring example, ODS has failed to explain how it calculated the results of its tax plan. Particularly embarrassing were Topolánek’s questions to journalists about their salaries. He had wanted to show the media how much better their own incomes would be after an ODS win. When journalists withheld this personal information, a furious deputy ODS party chairman Pavel Bém, Prague mayor, said he knew their salaries, and named a fantastic sum most newspaper reporters can only dream about. 
Meanwhile, in an effort to win back voters to the center-left ČSSD, Rath has softened his rhetoric and promises to work for more “moderate” change – and the Greens are making both the government coalition and the opposition nervous: The SZ, which is polling at between 7 and 8 percent, a comfortable margin above the 5 percent threshold to enter Parliament, has positioned itself as a centrist party. 
Green leader Martin Bursík – minister of the environment in 1998 during Josef Tošovský’s caretaker government – is something of a wild card: He has been a member of four different parties now, including the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL), a junior member of the ruling coalition. The question now is how “green” are the Czech Greens under Bursík; they’ve said little about the debate now raging in the European Union over illegal waste exports from Germany to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. 
In fact, the SZ are already behaving like a run-of-the-mill minor political party, and even won some voters from the ČSSD, no doubt positing themselves to enter a coalition – but which one? 
The conservative KDU-ČSL is certain to defect to the ODS, should it emerge victorious in the June elections; they find common ground in a platform based on security, the family and their opposition to registered partnerships: Part of the ODS membership formerly voted for the KDS (Christian Democratic Party), which merged with the ODS. 
A combination of the ODS, the KDU-ČSL and the Greens could be an unusual, and conservative, coalition. The question is how hard the Greens would push on ecological issues, and how much the party would follow ODS’ lead in other spheres. Bursík’s political background only hints such a coalition would become more Christian. 
But first the Greens must actually make it into Parliament. Three months is a lifetime in Czech politics and the rise of the SZ could simply be a warning signal to the “traditional” parties by voters for their favored parties to reverse unpopular measures. If the Greens do make it they will undoubtedly behave like all other small parties and pick, and switch, sides according to motives known only to them. 
Irena Ryšánková is a parliamentary analyst for public broadcaster Česká televize