Sociologist says the Czech middle class has been suggesting to the poor that it wants nothing to do with them

“It’s a particular paradox of our times that the people who are the worst off give their trust to those who are monied, who live in luxury, and who have never personally experienced what they live through every day. They live in the false hope that these people will pull them out of poverty,” he summarizes.

Q: We last spoke three years ago after Zuzana Čaputová was elected President of Slovakia and the subsequent parliamentary elections yielded the defeat of the Smer party and the hope of change. Back then I used a comparison from sports, which you objected to a bit, that the Slovaks were “ahead” of the Czechs 2:0. It was surprising to me that you were giving credit to Igor Matovič and investing a certain amount of hope in him. What does the situation look like now?

A: The Czech Republic is winning. I gave credit to Matovič because he entered the political skating rink at the head of an anti-corruption party. Corruption in Slovakia was actually an enormous problem then, and Matovič represented a huge hope. My disappointment is with three things. He went into his campaign in a weird way, presenting a poll instead of a program. Naturally I’m not against dialogue, but that seemed quite cheap to me. The second thing: It really helped his campaign when he filmed a video in Cannes at the villa of former Finance and Transport Minister Ján Počiatek (Smer), promising to return that property, which in his view was Slovak, to the people of Slovakia. He never arranged anything of the sort. The third thing: During his term in office he performed several actual deeds, such as buying the Sputnik vaccine from Russia, making unclear statements abroad, etc. His main agenda came from social media. The best kind of government, as is known, is the kind that people don’t have to know much about, because that means they don’t have any problems. Matovič aired absolutely everything, though, even from inside the coalition government. Slowly, it fell apart. After a relatively short boom period, the reality in Slovakia is such that no coalition exists anymore, there will be early elections, and exactly those parties and people who should be defeated due to their corrupt behavior have the highest voter preferences. The hopes of three years ago have not been fulfilled.

Q: That suggests a comparison to Andrej Babiš…

A: It’s evident that Babiš lost the election massively, and it’s clear why. He’s like Matovič in that sense – his entire time in office was accompanied by his perpetually pointing the finger at the “enemy”. He didn’t care in the least what kind of arguments he used, and he lied quite frequently. Comparing his remarks with the facts usually turned out to his detriment. It was just a question of time before his people realized how out of it he is. His time has run out. What startled me on the day after the election was over was that spurt of positive emotion. It was as if Petr Pavel’s victory was manna from Heaven and Paradise on Earth would now begin. From my own brief political work, I know what the shelf life of such emotion is. That will turn around fast and Pavel will become a person at whom everybody will take potshots. The anti-system group of voters is massive in the Czech Republic.

Q: If we speak of the SPD as the commercial fascists, then how should we categorize the group who convened that demonstration of tens of thousands of people on Wenceslas Square?

A: They have to speak in even more fascist terms to “clamp down” and differentiate themselves from their competition, which the SPD is. If you do a simple thought experiment, there’s a clear, visible correlation between the attitude taken by such radicals toward vaccination against COVID-19, toward Russia’s aggression, toward what the conflict is between politics and regular life. They are pushing the boundaries to an absolutely absurd degree.

Q: What is the common foundation that unites them?

A: They’ve found an explanation for what is going on and a space that’s close to their mentality. For the democratic, liberal parties, what’s typical is that they have many streams of thought, they’re more or less political parties for individuals, but a unified attitude is to be expected among these other kinds of parties. They easily unify, it’s in their DNA. What the Czech Republic and Slovakia have in common is the absence of normal, standard politicians, and in Slovakia that problem is even more exacerbated.

Q: The first round of the Czech presidential elections especially revealed a particular phenomenon, as did the second round, somewhat, which is that people living in the poorest, forgotten regions voted for Babiš. In the media, this was covered with the shorthand of “Chanov votes Babiš“. How do you explain that?

A: That’s a civilizational phenomenon. The multibillionaire Trump won in the United States thanks to those living in precarity. People from the periphery, the poor, the unemployed, the out-of-the-way places. That happened to Babiš before, and Fico and Mečiar mined that vein in Slovakia. It’s a particular paradox of our times that the people who are the worst off give their trust to those who are monied, who live in luxury, and who have never personally experienced what they live through every day. They live in the false hope that these people will pull them out of poverty

Q: Fake ideals?

A: Yes, but if you say this is a fake ideal, I feel it’s a cliché. I have the sense that those of us who say about ourselves that we belong among the elites are to blame for these ideas. We’re the ones who couldn’t find the strength to work in those regions. We have open access to the media, but we haven’t found the right vocabulary to use with those people, a language in common with them. We’re the ones who have been suggesting to them, through our behavior, that we want nothing to do with them.

Q: Incoming Czech President Petr Pavel is saying that he wants to focus on people in excluded regions and visit them. It reminds me a bit of “Forgotten Slovakia”, a campaign prior to the 2020 elections, when artists and other people traveled to excluded areas in particular. The consequence was, among other matters, that the followers of Kotleba were weakened during the elections. Is a similar campaign the way forward for the Czech Republic, too?

A: “Forgotten Slovakia” was done by Andrej Bán, among others, one of the few Slovak journalists who is on the scene when something happens. If something goes wrong in eastern Slovakia, he’s there. He lives with those people, he sleeps where they do. When he writes an article it’s a piece with knowledge of the matters at hand, not from an ivory tower. However, just a handful of people also interact with those who are the followers of Kotleba. I don’t believe that campaign events of this kind, which begin and then end, can change the atmosphere in society. There are no easy, short-term solutions. We can see how the east of Slovakia is becoming empty of any people, gradually. Young people don’t want to live there, so they’re leaving. You go to a village, two-thirds of the buildings are empty, and elderly people are living in the other third.

Q: You and your colleague Jan Urban came to Ústí nad Labem to introduce your book, Mýty v nás a kolem nás [The Myths In And Around Us], which the two of you wrote between March 2021 and March 2022, i.e., during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was then supplanted by the wartime insanity after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. You assert that the central motif of our considerations is our national mythology, because the drama of humanity and what it means to be human has played out against that background since time immemorial. Which national myth, in your view, influences our present the most?

A: The myth of Great Russia. Some myths have a special, suicidal quality that becomes reality, a bloody reality. In Slovakia, a quite current myth is that of the thousand-year suffering of the Slovak nation – that myth dates back to before the Slovak nation even existed. It is generated by a sense of victimization, as we can very well see.

Q: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán works with national myths quite ably…

A: Yes that’s the myth of Great Hungary, which Orbán abuses and feeds in quite a dense, sophisticated way. Orbán is, unlike Babiš or Matovič, a very educated, intelligent guy. He actually shows his political will through the art of governing, while Babiš and Matovič are primitives.