Prague - Last weekend's early general election was expected to end a months-long political crisis in the Czech Republic. But it has been only three days since the results were announced on Saturday and it is already clear that the crisis is deeper than ever.
The Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) won the vote, but much less decisively than it hoped and than was universally expected. The Czech Republic's largest left-wing party secured only 20.45 percent of the vote, less than two percentage points ahead of ANO 2011 (18.65 percent), a movement established just two years ago by Czech billionaire Andrej Babis. The CSSD hoped to achieve around 30 percent of the vote.
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Moreover, an internal division inside the party started to escalate almost immediately after the election. On Saturday evening, while CSSD chairman Bohuslav Sobotka was attending a post-election discussion held by state-run Czech Television only a few hours after the polls closed, CSSD deputy chairman Michal Hasek and some of his closest allies met in secret with President Milos Zeman.
Hasek is considered the leader of a pro-Zeman camp inside the CSSD, while Sobotka represents Zeman's opponents.
The following day, on Saturday 27 October, both President Zeman and Michal Hasek publicly said that Sobotka should step down as CSSD leader. When Sobotka refused, the CSSD board voted to exclude him from talks with other parties on forming a new government.
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On Monday, Sobotka attended a rally held by his supporters in Prague where he announced he would start his own independent talks with ANO 2011 and the Christian Democratic Party (KDU-CSL), two parties considered the most likely coalition partners for the CSSD.
Both ANO 2011 and the KDU-CSL said they would wait for the chaotic situation inside the CSSD to calm down and clarify itself.
Sobotka called the latest development in the party an "attempted coup" and added that President Milos Zeman, assisted by his closest advisers and his left-wing SPOZ party, was meddling with the CSSD's internal affairs in order to achieve control over it.
Sobotka also said that instead of negotiating a new government, the CSSD was "attempting to commit suicide live on TV."
The destructive feud between the two camps inside the CSSD, the pragmatic pro-Zeman camp currently led by Hasek and their more idealistic opponents represented by Sobotka, started ten years ago when some CSSD lawmakers voted against the party's own candidate Milos Zeman in the 2003 presidential vote.
Several analysts argue that the ongoing "coup" against Sobotka was carefully prepared in advance by President Zeman and Michal Hasek and that, because of the situation inside the CSSD and the gloomy coalition math, there is a high chance of a new election soon. Some also say that the party may split in the same way as the right-wing Civic Democratic Party (ODS), until very recently the arch-rival of the CSSD, split around 15 years ago.
