Social Democrats left with ‘lessons to learn’ from European election defeat

What will the results of this weekend’s European elections actually mean for the parties in the Czech Parliament? And could we have seen them coming? To find out I spoke to Vladimíra Dvořáková, a political analyst at the Prague School of Economics, and started by asking her whether Sunday’s results came as something of a surprise:

Jiří Paroubek, photo: CTK

“To some extent I would say that this is a surprise. It is not a surprise which parties got into the European Parliament; I think these four parties were predicted to pass the five percent result necessary to get in. What is surprising is the difference between the Civic Democrats, the victors of these elections, and the Social Democrats. It was something like a nine percent difference which was rather surprising, because something like one month ago or maybe more, it was supposed that the Social Democrats would win these elections and their support was five percent higher than that of the Civic Democrats.”

So how did the Social Democrats, in your opinion, manage to lose that five-percent lead?

“Partly it is because the Social Democrats’ traditional voters very often do not participate in European parliamentary elections, so it was connected to the rather low turnout. But I think it was also partly because of the electoral campaign. The Social Democrats were not able to explain why they toppled the cabinet in a no-confidence vote. And the Civic Democratic Party all the time said that the Social Democratic Party went against a very successful government headed by the Civic Democratic Party. And the Social Democrats were not able to explain why they did it. The discourse was taken by the Civic Democrats who said that the Social Democrats had voted against a successful government, and I think that this was a mistake on the part of the Social Democrats.”

Mirek Topolánek, photo: CTK

Would you say, as many have, that a victory for the Civic Democrats in this weekend’s European elections may not actually prove all that good a thing?

“No, no, no. I would say that it is very important for the Civic Democratic Party that they won these elections, because last autumn they lost at the regional elections and this is something which strengthens the leader of the party’s position and shows that the party is again able to act and win in elections. So it is important.

“But on the other hand I really do not think that this can help us to predict what will happen in parliamentary elections [this autumn] because there will be a totally different turnout at parliamentary elections, there will be other conflicts at that time, and probably the Social Democrats will learn lessons from this result, from their loss in these elections.”