What do Czechs expect from America's new president?
This Tuesday Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America. Mr Obama takes his oath of office in front of a huge crowd in Washington and millions and millions of people around the rest of the world. Excitement has been building ahead of the Obama presidency in Europe as well as the US, with the Czech Republic proving no exception. A recent STEM poll found Mr Obama Czechs’ favourite foreign politician by a margin of nearly 20 percent. But when it comes down to it, what do Czechs actually expect of America’s new leader? We asked a few on the streets of Prague:
Man: “I hope that Obama fixes the financial situation in the world, and I hope he ends the war in Iraq. But those are probably the answers that everybody would give.”
Young woman: “I hope America will not be a military state any more, that they won’t send their army to other parts of the world. I don’t agree with this policy of America, that they send their army to Afghanistan, to Iraq – and I hope they will take their army back to America.”
The key word throughout Obama’s presidential campaign was change. But what differences will there really be between Mr Obama’s policies and those of the outgoing president George W. Bush? Earlier today, I asked Kryštof Kozák, a professor of American studies at Prague’s Charles University:
“There will definitely be a lot more continuity than you would expect. US foreign policy is, for example, a long-term process and the bureaucrats in Washington have a sort of inertia. Many of them served under Clinton so they know the game in Washington and, in this respect, you can’t expect a revolution.
“But on the other hand, some things can change pretty quickly. A lot of people have been talking about the closure of Guantanamo, for example. And there are quite a lot of things the president can do just with the stroke of a pen. Closing Guantanamo is one thing, and then there are so-called executive orders. You can use an executive order to mandate increased fuel efficiency for cars, just like that. So on the level of smaller changes, things can start happening quite quickly. But it won’t be like Russia in 1917 when people took over the government and crazy things started happening.”
President Bush leaves office not a very popular man – in America at the moment his poll ratings are around 20 percent. But here he has received a lot of praise, both from Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek and President Václav Klaus. Would you say that this is the general opinion here, that President George Bush hasn’t been the unpopular, failure president that some Americans are seeing him as right now?
“Well I think that Czechs are kind of divided on this issue because, for example, I teach students as well, and with the students, they are very much in this American mindset and they see President Bush as a big failure – I would say that most of them are like this. But what you see here is that there is a very strong automatic anti-Russian sentiment, and so people supported John McCain because of his stronger stance against Russia. So, I think people here are not really able to judge the Bush presidency by its merits, but instead as a symbol of, you know, ‘you have to have a strong American presidency, you have to stand up to dictators, you have to stand up to Russia’. I think, symbolically speaking, in this respect, the Bush presidency was good for Czechs in that way.”
“Well, obviously, people here are talking a lot about missile defence. And I think at this point it is really not very clear what is going to happen. Because Obama has opened a small door for himself in that he has said he wants to test the system properly before pouring more money into it. But, at the same time, he has said that he is committed to the project in general. So, I think what we might see is some postponement of the deployment, and it really will depend on what sort of budget these people will have to implement these things as well.”
President Obama will be in Europe for a NATO summit in April. How likely is it that he will, as the Czech government has requested, visit us here in the Czech Republic?
“Well, this will have to be a totally wild guess. I have no idea, and the thing is that his schedule is very busy. And apart from the missile defence – and I think that Obama will try and delay this issue – I would think that his advisors will tell him that there might be a more productive use of his time than to get bogged down in these issues which might be politically rather dangerous for him.”
