Czeching out the election:
White, George Abbott
REPORT FROM PRAGUE CZECHING OUT TOE ELECTION NO FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS This past February Vaclav Havel declined Harvard University's invitation to give the commencement address because the speech...
...Helping us see beyond our slavery years and regaining our self-respect, recreating brother and sisterhood, Vaclav will locate the middle road between the best of capitalism and socialism, the individual's rights and duties...
...This is the first time Czechs have a government they trust...
...Twelve million Czechs (Bohemians and Moravians), three-and-a-half million Slavs, and minorities of Hungarians, Gypsies, Ukrainians, and Vietnamese will vote for individual candidates endorsed by or affiliated with a still uncertain number of parties...
...Depending upon how, when, or who is doing the counting, the number of parties ranges from twenty-seven to forty...
...jail terms and fines were used as encouragement...
...Their premise is a functioning, integrated society...
...But Stern adds, "Vaclav goes beyond winning and losing...
...Other observers suggest that half that is a possibility, with the Communists getting as little as 6 percent or as much as Civic Forum's 30 percent...
...we were all losers and he makes us feel we can once again be winners...
...Four other parties are expected to share the rest: the Socialists, Social Democrats, Populist-Christian, and the Greens...
...Universities...
...The end result was a kind of "parallel" government: a Communist party structure preselected the government's "candidates," pre-approved its legislative "agenda," and decided what laws were to be "passed...
...In a country where an estimated one in ten collaborated with the secret police and where the most creative were brutally silenced or forced to emigrate, the real currency of the day is accumulated guilt, demoralization, and postrevolutionary exhaustion...
...In retrospect the play wright-politician's judgment proved shrewd...
...Routinized, mindless "voting" for corrupt, rubber-stamping opportunists created a Kafkaesque electoral process...
...It is not Havel's script, he hasn't much choice of actors, the stage and properties are givens, and yet the show must go on...
...Havel's energizing moral force and articulate democratic voice are needed and may prove decisive in the increasingly confusing, chaotic electoral contest...
...The gravest concern: How many Communists will vote their own interests...
...Havel is lovely," says the distinguished memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly...
...Under the previous regime full participation was required...
...He opens his mouth and people have confidence in him...
...The Federal Assembly will elect the president (currently Havel), premier, vice-premiers, and speaker of the assembly (currently Alexander Dubcek), and, based on their electoral showing, help determine which party gets what ministries...
...Since November, "the Czech population is atomized...
...prior to November, five political parties existed on paper, though only the Communist party mattered...
...Electoral defeat of the Communists and more experienced appointees will prove Havel's strategy correct, Stern argues...
...Let critics stop carping and come help...
...Naturally Havel's advisors are amateurs, the only professionals in the country are the Communists, and what dilettante do you know who spends five years in prison for democratic values...
...REPORT FROM PRAGUE CZECHING OUT TOE ELECTION NO FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS This past February Vaclav Havel declined Harvard University's invitation to give the commencement address because the speech fell too close to Czechoslovakia's national elections...
...He listens, and when he speaks, it's with authority because he's speaking from us...
...Nonsectarian Marxist Egon Bondy sees a sad irony here if the party's staunchest opponents, perhaps 20 percent of the electorate, fail to constrain the Communists (and the ubiquitous secret police) through the ballot box...
...Both as national prop and prod, Havel has been extraordinary...
...The Velvet Revolution has been described as Vaclav Havel's "greatest drama...
...every day...
...On June 8 and 9, Czechoslovaks over the age of eighteen will be casting secret ballots for a bicameral Federal Assembly and a Czechoslovak National Council whose role is still unclear...
...Wasn't a democratic victory a foregone conclusion...
...In the view of Erazian Kohak, Boston University philosopher and dissident translator, "A Western political analyst can't help but get it wrong...
...The Slovaks have their own separate parties as do countless student and agricultural groups...
...I've even heard of a Beer Drinkers' party...
...Like other Central European voters caught between the cold war vise of Gold and Iron Curtains, the Czechoslovak "electorate" currently exists in little more than word...
...The rectors of Czechoslovakia's two major universities, Radim Palouch (Charles) and Josef Jarbo (Palacky) predict that Civic Forum candidates will garner 30 percent of the vote...
...Wherever Vaclav goes," says Stern," are crowds as far as you can see...
...Decades of domination and subservience have silenced democratic debate and numbed democratic initiative...
...And, despite recent critiques by Newsweek ("the honeymoon's over") and the Washington Post ("surrounding himself with amateurs and dilettantes"), Havel is Czechoslovakia's "last, best hope...
...As the "unschooled" president takes his show on the road in a European-style short campaign, criticism, disappointments, and tension will doubtless mount...
...only the Communist party and Civic Forum (of which Havel is a member) can be expected to retain anything like predictable group allegiance...
...The Anarchists will certainly raise a black flag or two...
...How many will now not vote as a matter of principle...
...A corollary question is how many ex-Communists and progressives will sit out the election...
...Some questioned his reasoning...
...Survivor of Auschwitz and Stalin's purges, Kovaly takes the long view...
...A democratic election, imperfect as it must be, is our beginning...
...and, according to Zdenek Slouka of Lehigh University, few "will confide their mixed feelings to anything like a pollster...
...But Slouka counters, "Havel is a very quick study and he's been learning about politics since the early sixties, not November as Western latecomers believe...
...Party members, their families, and collaborators constitute a hefty million people in a population of 12 million...
...No one under the age of sixty has exercised the right to cast a secret ballot, following open discussion of conflicting platforms...
...It sounds "so simple and so simple-minded," he acknowledges, "but when you actually live it, every day, words come to life...
...they look for voting blocs not individual tendencies...
...The presidency has always had great power," Kohak cautions, "more than Havel knows how to exercise...
...GEORGE ABBOTT WHITE George Abbott White lectured in Czechoslovakia in April as the guest of Charles and Palacky Universities...
...Wouldn't the Czech president speak to greater effect in Cambridge than Prague...
...A Civic Forum victory will render the secret police irrelevant...
...As a result, pre-election predictions "will be grounded on jello...
...Those who judge Havel a poor campaigner might listen to Jan Stern, a retired Prague journalist who joined the Communist party in Buchenwald and now feels close to Christian socialism...
...A critic of the previous regime and an early Havel supporter, Bondy feels that "Civic Forum must overcome its anti-Communist and anti-Socialist biases and provide a political place for those who wish a humane, active state...
...Dry bones are in the body politic, foul deeds in the collective memory, and they cannot be regenerated or undone in one season, or by one man, however good...
...Whether the Slovaks reject him or Czech exiles in America judge him inept, it is doubtful that anyone could do better, or nearly as well...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 11
