Civic Democrat leader’s political future hangs in balance

Leaders of the centre-right Civic Democratic party met for more than seven hours on Tuesday to discuss the future of party leader Mirek Topolánek, following an uproar over comments he made in a recent interview for a Czech gay magazine, in which he referred disparagingly to the Church, voters of a rival party, and members of the current government. Since the news broke several highly-placed members of his own party including the chairman of the Senate have called for him to quit, even though the country is just two months away from a national election.

Mr Topolánek has headed the Civic Democratic Party for some seven years, often successfully in the past, but the uproar over recent comments (including saying the Church had made idiots of the masses) have made the leader a serious liability. Mr Topolánek has made controversial statements often before, but the fallout over his most recent words appears to be the worst: he never had to face such a political battle in his career, least of all in a scandal of his own making.

Mirek Topolánek, photo: CTK

One reason why deliberations on Tuesday among party leaders have been so heated and drawn-out is almost certainly the problem that the Civic Democrats have no clear successor as chairman and no one with the experience of leading the party into difficult elections. The Civic Democrats are already trailing their rivals the Social Democrats in most polls, and changing its chairman now politically could prove risky at best. Meanwhile, in his defence, Mr Topolánek has said his words were taken out of context and that the whole scandal was artificial and overblown. Even the magazine he conducted the interview with has come out on his side, agreeing that his words were taken out of context. But by and large, the controversy has now gone far beyond that.

The long serving chairman is fighting to stay on as head of the Civic Democrats but even if he succeeds it will be difficult to imagine how he will be able to wrench the focus away from the scandal and back onto positives and his party’s plans two months ahead of the election. No matter what happens, fellow party members will have to make a concentrated effort and hope for the best. With Mr Topolánek or without, it will be difficult for the Civic Democrats to rebound in time, as already the opposition parties are capitalising as much as possible from this scandal, a misstep in national politics that doesn’t usually happen very often.