The Czech Senate at 30: “It prevents Hungarian-style illiberal turns”
The Czech Senate celebrated 30 years of existence in a ceremony on Tuesday evening. But what has the upper house of Parliament actually achieved in the last three decades? And could talk of abolishing it ever become reality? I discussed those questions with political scientist Petr Just.
The Senate was established by the Czech Constitution of 1993. But in 1996, when it actually came into existence, there wasn’t great enthusiasm for it. Why was there resistance to the Senate at that time?
“The Senate’s disadvantage was that it was something new, although we were kind of re-establishing the bicameral system that existed during the inter-war period.
“Of course not many people remembered that era, so for many in the 1990s the Senate was a genuinely new institution.
“They started to question whether we really needed something new, if it hadn’t existed until then and we had been doing quite well without it.
“And in the period between the 1993 constitutional wording and 1996 there was a debate about whether the Senate shouldn’t be removed from the Constitution, even before it existed.
“The debate was mainly around financial issues. People were debating, or hearing debates, about how much the new chamber would cost, how many limousines would need to be bought for officials, how many offices would be needed and how many palaces it would take up.
“But there was very little discussion about what the Senate actually does.”
One reason it was set up was to act as a stabilising institution. How successful do you think the Senate has actually been over the last three decades?
“The important thing when talking about the Senate as a stabilising institution is that it is supposed to serve at times of crisis. And times of crisis are very rare, of course.
“Like if you establish a fire department, you have to do it even at a time when there is no fire.
“Of course many people could say in the 1990s that the Czech Republic was in a relatively stable situation politically.
“But you never knew what might come, you never knew if sometime in the future the Senate would not be needed, to balance the power of the lower chamber, and therefore to balance the power of the government, which is accountable to it.
“So in my opinion the Senate has played this role, even when it was ‘in waiting’ for a certain period of crisis.
“We see that it does have an impact on the stability of the constitutional system, because when we compare it with events in, for example, Hungary or Slovakia, where they have unicameral parliaments, we see that the whole constitutional-political arena is in the hands of the ruling majority in the only existing parliamentary chamber.
“If anyone in Czechia would like to carry out similar radical political and constitutional reforms like Orban did in Hungary in the past 16 years, they would have to have the majorities in both chambers.
“So it is in a way a prevention of illiberal turns pushed by just one political party, or one coalition, being implemented without any broader consensus.”
Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has said that the Senate is pointless and should be abolished. But I presume that’s a very unlikely scenario, given that the Senate would have to vote against itself, or to vote itself out of existence?
“This opinion is not original. It’s not the first time that we have heard about the need to abolish the Senate. Andrej Babiš is repeating claims that many politicians before him did.
“Of course it is very unlikely, because you would need the three-fifths consensus of both chambers to make any constitutional amendments.
“On the other hand, we now see that Andrej Babiš is changing his rhetoric a little bit.
“He’s now emphasising the need to focus on Senate elections this fall and the partial renewal of the Senate that will come in October [when one-third of seats are up for grabs].
“Because he feels that now when he has a majority in the Chamber of Deputies the Senate – in today’s composition, which has a different majority than his ruling coalition in the lower house – could block, or at least delay, some of the legislation that his government wants to impose.”
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