A Thread for Politics in Continental Europe

Politics & News
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SPOLU Recommends

Before we begin, SPOLU is the Czech word for together and is comprised of three center-right parties of differing flavors who gained power by running on “Babis bad” and nothing really substantive beyond that. They have thrown their support behind three different candidates in this election. I don’t why three. I guess one for each party?

Pavel Fischer
Age: 57
Political Party: Independent
Political Experience: Current Senator of Prague 12, finished 3rd in the 2018 presidential election
Most Recent Poll Number: 6.2%

Like several other right-leaning candidates, he supports civlian gun ownership and would veto any attempts to further restrict it. He is Catholic and holds some pretty socially conservative views. Prior to the 2018 election, he stated that he would not support the election of a homosexual to the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. He does support further integration with the EU/NATO and does support Ukraine in their war against Russia.

Petr Pavel
Age: 61
Political Party: Independent
Political Experience: Former Chief General of the Army of the Czech Republic, Former Chairman of the Joint NATO Military Committee
Last Polling Result: 23%

Another former Communist who has “reformed” and changed his ways. His slogan when translated to English is, “Let’s return order and peace to the Czech Republic” which sounds way too much like Donald Trump to me. His military past doesn’t impress me and he hasn’t done much to separate himself from ideologically from the other two.

Danuše Nerudová
Age: 43
Political Party: Independent
Political Experience: None
Last Poll Number: 26.5%

Nerudová is an economist by trade and the rector of Mendel University in Brno. Her economic positions are very much third way Democrat positions which is not too inspiring. However, she’s really the only one who is going hard in the paint on some social/environmental issues and not being ganged up on as a result. She is hugely popular among young people which 54% of high schoolers voting for her in a mock election. This is mostly related to her having unarguably the strongest social media game out of any of the candidates.

She is not without flaws. Her husband owns a minority stake in a law firm that represents state-owned and private businesses which could lead to a conflict of interest. She also is under suspicion of basically handing out degrees to some students as rector but the results of the investigation won’t be published until after the election. Despite this, I would prefer Nerudová to win out of these three.

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And now we have…

The Favorite

Andrej Babiš
Age: 68
Political Party: ANO 2011
Political Experience: Former Prime Minister (2017-2021)
Last Polling Result: 30.1%

What’s there to say about this guy that hasn’t been said in this thread? He is the Donald Trump of the Czech Republic. A billionaire with a shady past entering politics because he wanted the spotlight on himself. A guy who has been in scandal after scandal, told his own party to go fuck itself after losing two votes of no confidence as PM, still runs the largest political party in the country, and is now the favorite to win the first round of the presidential election. Oh yeah, and he was a member of the Czechoslovak Secret Police in the 1980s. He’s hated by almost everybody in Prague but has huge followings in rural parts of the country.

The optimistic view is that this will be like the French elections where everybody voted Macron in the 2nd round because of how much they hated Le Pen. It was a very similar view held when Zeman ran for reelection in 2018. However, that idea was wasted when Jiri Drahos could only get 48% of the vote. So there is no guarantee here.

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The Zeman-supported candidate, Josef Stredula, has dropped out of the race and has thrown his support behind Danuše Nerudová. However, talking heads are unsure if all of his supporters will vote for her or if they will vote for Babis.

Seems to be a three horse race between Andrej Babis, Petr Pavel, and Danuše Nerudová. I suspect that whichever of the two SPOLU candidate loses will throw their support behind the one that advances. From there, Babis would have to sweep almost all of the outstanding votes to win the presidency. So the odds are stacked against him winning in the second round.

But again, people thought that about Zeman when he made it to the second round in 2018 and he ended up winning.

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So, it’s down to three major candidates. After the debates, there was a shift away from the female candidate and to the former NATO general. If the last polls are right, he and Babiš will go to the second round with the former winning the presidency.

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Make that two major candidates

Seems that Petr Pavel and Andrej Babis are within 0.33% of each other after the polls closed today at 2 pm at 35.36% and 35.03% of the vote respectively. The third, fourth, and sixth place finishers have already thrown their support behind the center-right candidate, Petr Pavel. If all of their supporters vote for Pavel in the second round, Petr Pavel would become the next president of the Czech Republic by +14 over Babis.

This is despite the fact that in the first round, only five of the 14 regions of Czechia (including Prague) came out in support of Pavel with the remaining 9 supporting Babis. Just that over 50% of voters in Prague voted for Pavel which is way out of proportion with the rest of the country.

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https://twitter.com/_maxgranger/status/1614450397359538176?t=7ViMf5CVk7LTHKDo1tQAxQ&s=19

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Huh. You would think mud is the natural environment for pigs.

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And round 2 of the Czech presidential election is on folks!

My school was being set up as an election station as I was leaving it. Petr Pavel might be the favourite but the odds have been dropping as of late. This is despite Babiš doing almost no campaigning or visits during the gap in the last few days

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Suck on it Babiš!

The Czech Donald Trump failed to become president! And it was a blowout by +16. Guess saying that you wouldn’t defend the Baltic states and Poland against Russia or uphold Article 5 of the NATO treaty really shot him in the foot in the debates. He’s still leader of the opposition in Parliament but this definitely hurt him.

Negative is that Petr Pavel is now president. He won’t do anything stupid like Zeman and isn’t owned by Russia (also like Zeman) but at the same time he’s a boilerplate center-right politician. So, he won’t do anything special either. As shocking as that sounds, being boilerplate center-right makes him the best president of the country since Vaclav Havel, the first president of Czech Republic.

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Macron went nuclear and pushed pension reform through without a vote. Dude has balls!

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At least until the angry union mobs get a hold of him.

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image

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Quick recap of the situation in France for those interested :

A new pension reform is being pushed through by Macron, which in particular raises retirement age and is hugely unpopular. Polls show that ~2/3 of the population is against it, and ~80% of working age (so basically most of the support comes from the already retired lol). There have been a couple months of protests in the streets, partial strikes etc.

Last week, Macron pushed the reform without a vote in parliament (where his party didn’t have a majority). The government is allowed to do that, only once per year in principle (but they are allowed more if this is part of a budgetary law, which is actually what they used this time). This is not that uncommon (another labor law which was heavily protested passed this way 7 years ago).

In principle, parliament could then still vote to “censure” the government, in which case the law fails and a new government has to form. There was a vote on Monday which failed, but was much closer than expected (only 9 votes shy, i.e. ~48.5% of congressmen voted for it).

After that, people were expecting some kind of reaction from the government, but Macron gave an interview on Wednesday where he basically failed to even give a token compromise to the opposition (for instance he could have fired his prime minister, which would in reality not change much since the president makes the decisions). Instead he doubled down on calling everyone else “irresponsible” in his usual patronizing way of speaking like he’s adressing children, and comparing the protesters to the Capitol rioters.

So this led to yesterday’s protest day, I think the 9th one since this started, which turned out to be the biggest one yet in # of protesters (or close to it, there are no reliable figures for obvious reasons, but at least in Paris this was bigger than before, even I went and I’m very lazy), with in particular student mobilization increasing.

I think a large lart of the anger now comes from this guy, being elected in large part by leftist votes against the far right candidate, now acting like this gives him enough legitimacy to decide more or less by himself against everyone else (public opinion, all the unions, parliament).

Very hard to predict what will happen next but :

Short term : protests will become more and more heated. Things have already become more violent from both police and (small portion of) protesters. I don’t see things going back to quiet without something happening, but no-one knows what this will be.
Longer term : seems very likely that Le Pen will be our next president. 4 years is a long time so things might change by then, but when the right wing candidate inevitably asks for votes in the 2nd round by saying “at least I am pro-democracy” it will not be credible. And of course, when the fascist government then decides to govern against everyone else/brutally it will not be seen as unprecedented.
However, one good thing from this whole thing is that unions have managed to keep a united front and will have been seen as a positive force by most, which may end up with them regaining more power.

Variance : next week the British king is coming for a visit. It is planned that Macron will host him for a dinner in Versailles (palace where French kings used to live before the guillotine days). Good chance that even he realizes this is not great PR but who knows lol

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Czech government has been talking about raising the retirement age for years but has punted constantly knowing how unpopular it would be.

Hopefully, this response stops them from thinking about it.

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Of course its unpopular but I am not sure what people expect. We live longer and if your system depends on one generation paying for another generation you will get in trouble at some point. I would like to know what the alternative is? Wait till the system collapses?

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Immigrants that pay payroll taxes help a lot with social security programs. But other than that it has to be some form of higher taxes or lower benefits. I’m sure the actuaries that monitor the funding of the plan have suggestions, if anyone wants to read their reports. I read the Canada Pension Plan actuary’s reports when they come out, I think they’re absolutely fascinating.

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There is the sense of wanting to have your cake and eat it.

I wish them luck but the decline in birth rates probably means at least one of a later retirement age, higher taxes or more immigration. Or if they’re so concerned about maintaining the “Frenchness” of their country they just need to procreate more.

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It may well be that reform is needed, but from what I understand the extent of the need is not that clear cut, there is also a lot of debate on what is the correct and fair way to do it, and there are other ways to bringing revenue that simply raising retirement age. I’ll admit that I’m not very knowledgeable on this subject.

What is clear however in the French situation is that most people do no trust Macron to do it properly, which is a big problem when trying to push through a huge societal change. His reform has been heavily criticized for making the less privileged incomes bear most of the cost, which would be in line with his fiscal policy so far which has mostly been to the benefit of the higher incomes.
This also has not been helped by the fact that the government themselves have not been able to present it in a convincing way (they have basically been shown to lie over and over again on the content of the law, probably hoping that people would not bother checking the details).

A pretty good hint imo is that ALL the unions have opposed the law, which unlike what you may think is actually pretty uncommon (it wasn’t the case for previous labor law changes under Hollande, or even for Macron’s previous retirement reform plan which he had to scrape due to covid).

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Neoliberal king here

https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1639187461577363456?t=LL2gyjzsIQoN-j99AeI-Ng&s=19

https://twitter.com/flglmn/status/1639361247731671049?t=EI_qg30uQI5PbWGPiNQlKg&s=19

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So I did some digging into this (I’m a pension actuary, this is what I consider “fun”).

Looking at some reports the “pension crisis” is that within the next couple of years best estimates are that the pension system will be in a deficit (i.e. contributions short of pension payment due) of about 10 billion Euro per year. That will last give or take 7-10 years.

10 billion Euros is a lot of money! But we’re talking about an expenditure that relates to the entire pension system of the entire national economy, so the numbers are big in absolute terms. In relative terms, the “low point” of the projections is that they will be about 0.3% to 0.4% of GDP short on their pensions for several years.

Current tax revenues for France are about 45% of GDP (THAT’S SOCIALISM!). So they’d need to increase taxes to about 1.01 Euros collected for every 1.00 Euro they collect right now. Although to be fair the 45% includes all taxes, and the national France government could only realistically increase their own share of the taxes which is 18% of GDP. So something like a 5% increase on taxes imposed by the national government for a decade is what it would take.

A combination of modest payroll taxes plus some extra taxes on rich people would probably get them there. And this is before even considering at all the possibility of some benefit reductions, for example something like increasing pensions by half of inflation instead of 100% of inflation would be a good way to lighten the load without draconian cuts.

I am going off of just a couple of hours of reading about the French pension system, but this seems more political to me that an absolute necessity forced by imminent “system collapse”. It seems more like Macron has certain GPD and tax burden ideological factors that he won’t cave on, and is driving through the retirement age change to avoid a serious debate about all the possible courses of action.

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