Public Affairs puts coalition agreement to online vote
Assuming all goes well in the last meeting of the emerging coalition on Friday – involving procedural aspects of cooperation between the Civic Democrats, TOP 09 and the Public Affairs party – the coalition agreement will be approved by the broader party leaderships, and in one case by unconventional means. In a first for Czech politics, Public Affairs, which presents itself as the party of direct democracy, will be asking its members to vote on the party’s participation in the government online. Earlier today I spoke with new MP and e-marketing businessman Viktor Paggio, who is involved in the party’s online referenda.
Are your future coalition partners – more traditional partners – not slightly frustrated with you over this method?
“They may be frustrated, but this is our internal process, and we said this in advance. At the first meeting, when our boss, Radek John, met the other chiefs of the political parties, he told them that we would run this decision through a referendum. So it is something that has been agreed on already. And actually in the other political parties – let me use the Civic Democratic Party as an example – there will be about 30 people who will decide whether the party will join the coalition government or not. In our party this will be thousands of people. So I actually believe that our decision has more legitimacy.”
“If 20 or 30% of our members vote, it will pass, because that is a lot of people, thousands of people.”
One journalist was actually able to register three times on your website and vote three times in one of your referendums. What does that really say about the process and how secure it is?
“First of all, that was about three months ago and the registration process was different. I’d like to say that we actually had the control mechanism at the time; we were checking IP addresses. And the journalist, Jiří X. Doležal, was managed to vote three times from one computer, but actually from our point of view this makes no difference, because in that referendum there were actually thousands of votes cast. So we consider this the price for being open, the price we have to pay to let people decide. Now, at this moment, we have a different system. People have to confirm their email addresses, we have the people confirm their cell phone numbers, and we also send a letter with a confirmation code to their home postal address. So we have now tightened the security measures so this cannot happen again.”
I have to say, after so much time and effort spent hammering out this coalition agreement, it’s very difficult to believe that if you actually had a negative response from your voters online you would actually resign on the emerging coalition.
