Pirate Party Leader to Be Prague mayor
praguemonitor.com
praguemonitor.com
The major implication for the whole country is that at least Prague citizens are absolutely fed up with ANO - that is important because they dominated the whole country politics for the last 2 periods. Today there are 2 other major parties - ODS (Občansko-demokratická strana, Civic Democracy Party) and the Pirate party. These are the three winners of the recent parliament vote - parliament politics affect local politics a lot in the Czech Republic. If you don't want to vote ANO then you vote ODS if you're more on the right (as in free market) and the Pirate party if you're more on the left. There are basically no other options - the remaining "major" (bigger than others but has almost no influence) party in the country is a racist one. Other previously major parties such as ČSSD (social democracy), KDU-ČSL (the Roman-Catholics) and KSČM (literal communists) have fallen down significantly over last 2 periods, most probably because of their cooperation with ANO.
Pirates have a good track record as far as local politics go, but it's a relatively new party and they only participated in smaller cities/villages so far (on top of their recent entry to parliament). This person is completely unknown. Let's see.
Prague is a beautiful city to visit, be it for a weekend or a week. But living there long term sucks - most of the Prague apart from historical centre is properly fugly, as soviet-style architecture is still all over the place, cramped high rise residential areas with high criminality, little nature around (major mountains are > 500km away, sea even further), Czech love to constantly complain and moan about almost everything (it really gets to you after some time). Gap between rich (ie IT workers, managers) and rest of population is big and widening, people constantly hate politics but vote an a-hole after a-hole for last 20 years. So rich often discuss how to shield themselves financially from the rest of country, politics and economy as much as possible - not an indication of paradise. Half of the country is xenophobic and/or racist (although ie Roma question is a complex one).
I've worked there for couple of years, to be successful in IT was trivial due to constant lack of senior people, from what I heard its even worse now due to massive off/near shoring of multinationals. When looking back, moving away was one of the best decisions of my life and major step up in quality of life.
Of course there are positive aspects, just like everywhere. Professionals (I can judge IT) are smart and work hard, beer is the best there is (for me) and as mentioned its a great starting point for career. There are people who consider it the best place for them. Interestingly, none I know in this category lived abroad for longer to properly compare.
But that's me, I love these high altitude places, and based on amount of Czech you can meet anywhere in the Alps even people there love them. The thing is, high mountains are the last place of true wilderness, rest has been conquered and cultivated long time ago and is usually just a substitute for things that were.
I've met people in Prague that didn't get this, they were asking what the heck am I doing in those stupid mountains. Everybody is different, the only thing important is to be happy with where you are. I've found my place (Switzerland, in 45 minutes drive I am right under Mont Blanc).
The nature of the outsourcing/nearshoring industry sets the top limit for the salaries at ~90k CZK annually and imply problems with finding senior professionals.
Funny, so do all ex-Yugoslavs, and I understand Russians do too. Could be some kind of Slav thing. Or communist :-)
It's quite saddening to read CZ has similar issues. We've been in CZ in 2007 and Prague in 2017. I liked Prague a lot in 2007, not so much after ten years.
(I'm a software engineer and use Uber in Prague every week or two.)
There are local companies that are a bit cheaper, as others have already said.
Can you explain more what the platform of the "Pirate" party is? As an American I would have thought the the "Pirate" party would be far right libertarian (free market, downsize government, reduce or eliminate taxes).
The context is that we have very big gov't with lot of benefits, and (kind of, it's complicated) high taxes.
In such situation left has nowhere else to go (defending status quo is not very popular), so it's full of (often stupid) populists.
"Intellectual" elite is heavily leaning right, to the point of being anti-populist (they are regularly sacrificing votes just to virtue signal).
Pirates seem like a non-bullshit party that tries to stray from both extremes. They had some PR fails (they sometimes seem amateurish), but mostly seem to be really good alternative for people wanting to limit the gov't but not cut it to little pieces.
At the same time yes, they propose to downsize the government and tax reduction, but not elimination. They also propose digitalization of government and reduction of bureaucracy, but they also want that as a base to build more control on.
Many specifics of the Czech Republic are at play here, since the party is no longer a minor one and at the same time is the only major "non traditional" one (no historical baggage including people - actually that's very important) that isn't Babiš (ANO, but everyone knows the party is him, basically - including people in the party who went public), it attracts the interest of many very different people ranging from left wing radicals to free market anarchists; people who weren't as "radical" (they're not radical at all but definitely more than other parties) rather joined ODS (right, major party), ČSSD (left, almost irrelevant) or TOP09 (center, now totally irrelevant).
Then the free market anarchists created their own party (Svobodní - "The Free Ones", never even became relevant except a very tiny little bit of relevance in the EU parliament) and the result is that Pirate party is more leftist. Sadly soon after conservatives have "attacked" (joined and changed the program) the party and made it conservative, and a lot of previously pro-free market people became conservative because of the immigration crisis and rapidly increasing EU influence that nobody here really likes, left or right (these same issues also gave rise to the fourth biggest party SPD, which is an openly racist pro-russian one, luckily they're largely irrelevant except for municipal politics in few places).
You make them look like they actively go around destroying bridges. One footwalk collapsed by accident and people rushed to investigate other bridges to prevent another collapse. Of course they found them in state of crumbling down so obviously tehy had to be shut down/prepared for reconstruction. You attribute the blame to ANO while it was more due to chance.
You listen too much to house development lobby if you attribute the housing bubble to them. It'm more likely caused by global historically low interest rates.
The taxi mafia question is hardly going to be solved unless the next government has economic understanding of the problem. By appeasing to all parties involved they can hardly move it forward.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_municipal_election,_201... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Krn%C3%A1%C4%8Dov%C3%A... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanka_tunnel_complex
Part of reason was overreaction to the mayor who built the tunnel - the construction was overpriced and took 10 times the time it should, so mayors after him were afraid to invest too much in infrastructure at all. Which had negative effects in bridges falling apart, and city being in permanent traffic jam.
My other point of view: I used to be active member of Czech Pirate Party years ago when it was small, and it is still a little funny and frightening to me at the same time that those people will be responsible for city of 1 million people. But, what's the worse that can happen...
Libeň bridge, one of the only few Cubist style bridges in the world, has been closed for past two years, Troja pedestrian bridge collapsed last year and just a few days ago it turned out another bridge has to be collapsed and rebuilt from scratch.
Add to that the fact that she called the people complaining about the traffic issues "zpovykaní" or whiners and that adds up to a lot of people not liking her at all.
This was amazing. A friend of mine has bought a humble flat and got 100% profit on the investment in just a couple of years! What are the chances the prices are going to fall significantly? Should I advice him to sell now?
Regarding the implications, all 3 parties in the coalition mostly agree about everything. I'm happy about the result and about ANO losing.
In general the trouble with Pirates is unpredictability. They are very socially liberal, but economically and geopolitically they attract a wide mix of opinions. The have a higher incidence of conspiration theorist, they have a strong anti-US base, and in general they avoid to address these topics since it cannot pass the internal voting that is part of their control structure. In communal politics it does not have so severe implications, so the biggest question is how fit he is managerial wise.
The new mayor was virtually unknown before the election, it's just a gamble at this moment and everybody is "let's wait and see, can't be worse than the previous arrogant mayor Krnacova from ANO"
Yes, because in Eastern Europe, if you're even slightly left, or don't agree with U.S. on everything, you must be a communist.
Apparently from one block to the other.
As someone from that part of the world, I generally find it annoying that people automatically assume left == communist because of the Soviet past. As a result, we mostly have only right-wing or neoliberal type parties in Eastern Europe, because if you propose any sort of social democracy, you'd end up being attached to communism.
I view it as very unfortunate and simplistic. As in, communism didn't work out, let's run waaay to the right. Oh, right is bad? Let's run even further to the right, that outta fix it!
(Failing to realize that what you really dislike is authoritarianism, which these all share.)
How about a social democracy? The Scandinavian model? Market economy with strong social programs.
So you could start a business without being absolutely mortified about what'd happen if it fails, for example? How else is the overall standard of living supposed to improve over there? Corporate tax cuts and trickle-down economics has been tried, it doesn't work.
So to answer your point, how do you start a business while being mortified whether you're breaking some law and whether what you're doing is even allowed at all, and whether you'll become unable to pay all the taxes and afford all the compliance required, and whether your business will become illegal next year (happened to many people here already, it's absolutely not an irrelevant fear - actually Airbnb is the livelihood of many people in Prague and the Pirate party essentially wants to destroy or at least very significantly impact their businesses)?
That's why we have the joke. Not because everything left is automatically bad - ČSSD was the leading party for many years as well as KDU-ČSL. There is no party that stands for the Nordic model.
And people don't like the USA here, btw.
However...
> (Failing to realize that what you really dislike is authoritarianism, which these all share.)
... completely agreed on that.
So in essence these sorts of parties are no different than the right ones, they stand for incrementalism+cronyism and because incrementalism doesn't work for many people they turn to the right as a result.
If you think to Bernie Sanders vs Hillary Clinton, parties like ČSSD and KDU-ČSL represent the Hillary type, but what you really need on the left is the Bernie, or even better, Jeremy Corbyn type of person/party.
I agree that corrupt bureaucracy is a problem, but breaking barriers to entry for small/medium businesses is on top of the left-wing agenda in parts of the world where real left actually is, that's why when you think of European startups, you think Scandinavia.
> There is no party that stands for the Nordic model.
That's because the Nordic model is a nuanced one and from my experience you get shouted at as if you're a communist if you ever mention it in Eastern Europe, mostly because people don't understand it, but it's hard to even make your case without getting attacked.
Prague is also divided into smaller parts, that have their own leadership, and that is also important for individual citizens. In the part where I live, I was quite happy with how it changed in the last 4 years. There were things that were built, that improved my life, and there were public and priate projects started that will improve it even further. Even on the whole city level, the public transport got significantly cheaper 3 years ago.
On a slightly off-topic note, I've been playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided the last few weeks, which takes place in Prague, so this headline made me wonder for a moment if I was in-game...
No radicals though. They're moderate left, but they cooperate with parties on the right as well. Greens in the Czech Republic are radical communists.
They would be appealing to people who are right wing economically, but don't like the conservative/religious baggage, which comes with US republicans or UK's conservatives.
Low taxes are not necessarily rightist, people would want low and fair taxes even within a full-on socialism; same with everything else you listed, IMO these ideas are neutral. Keeping deficit low is just basic financial management, everyone wants that regardless of their ideas about control.
The difference is whether they want more free market or more government control, even if the control is very cheap, straight forward and efficient or even beneficial, it doesn't matter.
The Chinese communist party also lowered taxes and tries to lower bureaucracy but remains communist (I know, it's much more complex - let's not dive into Chinese politics - and I'm not trying to compare them, just an example how a popularly "rightist" idea can be proposed/implemented by a leftist party).
But yes, as you said they're appealing to people on the right - because as someone who's pro-free market it's better to vote moderate left (and hope they won't focus on the ideas you don't like) than conservative right (who will definitely focus on ideas you don't like these ideas are their main point).
I know the leader has departed but obviously he had the party's support. He lost support because of bad election result, not because they didn't agree with him. From my discussion with other significant Green party members that want to nationalize infrastructure companies, ban cars, increase taxation a lot, redistribute wealth in large amounts etc I'm not really sure what else should they be if not radical communists.
Please don't call people who aren't actually fascist "radical fascists" ever again. It's a huge insult here; the fascists killed a lot of my family.
Fun fact for others: We call the Green party "The Watermelons" - because they're green on the outside but red on the inside.
Young greens are tightly linked with the Green party. It is in fact the youth wing of the green party.
Our 'proper' left parties that have some power are those old-school leftist parties that are pro-Russian. The irony is that they are usually quite fond of Trump.
And I sincerely wish our Green Party had ever gotten 3%.
I’m not sure what you consider left but I’d hazard a guess we disagree based on your comment.
Praha Sobe - an local movement led by a popular mayor of one of Prague neighborhoods Cizinsky. Hard to characterize in left/wing system.
Not included:
ODS - "right wing" mix of conservative populists, anti-EU nationalists, local department of corruption and some sane and competent people. Aggressive anti-pirates campaign put them out possible coalitions (though they got most votes).
ANO - technocratic/populistic party lead by an StB agent billionare. They screwed the last 4 years really big way (collapsing bridges...). Spent zillions on campaign in the last year.
Not even got any seats: soc-dem (Left wing. Local department of corruption and without sane/competent people. Screwed the last 4 years big way together with ANO), greens, communists, SPD (not even trying to pretend they are not fascist any more), other local formations, circus party (don't ask, please)...
You are forcing me to ask: Wait, what party?
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
The city itself is so beautiful.
I take it it's different in India?
Everything in Prague is walkable and has public transport :-)
It's worth learning as much Czech as you are able to, but you would be fine managing on your own for a few months, especially if you can befriend a local who can help you get on your feet when you arrive (tips on currency conversion, places to eat, places to avoid, setting up a transit pass, etc.)
Life in Prague if you're coming to visit is quite great. I love every minute of the almost two years I was able to spend there and around the Czech and Slovak republics.
Staying close to the airport is probably the top priority ;)
Is Prague safe for a quiet+european+foreign+laptop-carrying male? Or should i stick to the tourist areas?
Rowdy and drunk groups of tourists are the most unsettling thing that I occasionally encounter, so maybe it's better to avoid tourists areas instead?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Peace_Index#Global_Peac...
Not only ANO is worried, also all the established parties have all incentives to throw dirt at him to keep the pirates out of more important political roles.
This is very exciting news.