The Czech laboratory for politics: Ústí nad Labem and the "black mugs"
Every city gets the kind of leadership it deserves. In the case of local politicians, every city gets the ones they elect, which is the same thing, to a certain degree.
Since the Association of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) movement in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic went into a local coalition with the “Freedom and Direct Democracy” (SPD) movement, which the courts have recognized as a fascist movement now seated in Parliament, and since they brought two defectors from other parties into their coalition, it’s no wonder that the local assembly meetings have become stomach-turning. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
The City of Ústí nad Labem has committed many deeds which will assure its immortality when it comes to addressing social issues. What’s interesting is that most of them are solutions which, over time, we must admit are dead ends, but what can be done?
We’re accustomed to this in the north of Bohemia, nobody here is going to pull “nonsense” on us like housing the homeless, or vigorously cutting off trafficking in poverty by cutting housing benefit payments to unscrupulous landlords. Ústí nad Labem is associated above all with the fence that was once erected on Matiční Street [Translator’s Note: to separate the non-Roma and Romani parts of the neighborhood], with the idea of declaring its entire territory to be a ghetto [Translator’s Note: to prevent impoverished persons from moving in] and with its most recent attempt to address the ghetto at the Mojžíř housing estate, as a problem, by cancelling the direct transportation connection from it to the city center.
In practice, it’s supposed to work like this: No more trolleybus lines will serve Mojžíř, a part of the city on its outskirts along the road to Děčín. Whoever wants to travel from the center to that housing estate (or ride from Mojžíř into the city center) has to transfer to a bus in Neštěmice where one enters through the doors closest to the driver only and where tickets are constantly checked more strictly.
We won’t comment on these measures in and of themselves, there would be too many questions to raise. It’s no surprise that the summertime session of the local assembly, announced hastily during vacation for 31 July, could not ignore this subject.
Ústí nad Labem and the Ústecký Region are frequently called the laboratory of Czech politics for good reason. What is tested there, under smaller-scale conditions, later causes trouble at the statewide level. Sometimes these experiments end in full-blown explosions, if we recall, for example, political murders or the stealing of EU funds, at other times they are just small experiments emitting foul odors in tiny amounts. We are focusing on these details in a new column. Welcome to the laboratory.
This move was not addressed until the part of the agenda called “miscellaneous” and was, once again, quite a show of haute politique. Anybody interested in seeing how these elected officials behave, discuss and vote had to wait a couple of days for the official written minutes from the session to be published.
Those minutes are, shall we say, abbreviated, and we find the following in them, for example: “Ing. Hůla: ‘I’ve worked in transport and I don’t understand why we’re introducing the new job of transportation assistant – experience from Paris – couldn’t that be considered? Why doesn’t the conductor do this?’ “
Ing. Jaromír Hůla is a local assembly member for the local SPD-Tricolor coalition and was, among other things, the certifier of these minutes. Maybe that is why his full remarks have been replaced by this shorthand reference to his “experience from Paris”.
Let us review what those full remarks were, as captured on video: “I’ve been working in transportation for 47 years, and I really don’t get why we’re introducing yet another job, this time of transportation assistant. Why doesn’t the conductor do this? I’ll tell you my experience from Paris. I was saving money, so I booked a cheap hotel, but it was in the Senegalese quarter at the last metro stop. Two police officers and a conductor got on at that metro stop and checked tickets between there and the next stop. They threw off a few black mugs here and there and that solved it.”
The official full video recording is not yet available from this session of the local assembly, but a significant segment of the transportation expert’s remarks were recorded on video by a local assembly member for the Pirates, Jana Kočárková Maredová, who posted it to social media with this commentary: “This was during a city assembly session that was open to the public and has no business happening in a respectable society!” Yes, every city has just the leadership it deserves.
In the case of local politicians, every city gets the ones they elect, which is the same thing, to a certain degree. In Ústí nad Labem they have elected a racist dummy from early in the last century.
He’s part of a coalition where the other partners – the ANO movement and two defectors who would do anything to be in office – are saying: This doesn’t bother us. The main thing is, we’re in charge.
The Czech language original of this article was written for the Institute of Independent Journalism, an independent nonprofit organization and registered institute which provides information, journalism and news reporting. Its analyses, articles and data are equally available to all for use under certain conditions.
