Czech Greens part of coalition government
They win hundreds of seats in past election
By Petr Stepanek
Czech Green Party

	Petr Stepanek, Czech Green Party Deputy Chairman

2006 was a breakthrough year for Strana Zelenych (SZ), the Czech Green Party. Facing multiple elections, they became the first new party to enter the Parliament by election since the 1930s. Czech Greens ran several hundred campaigns in towns and villages throughout the country, winning 447 seats in the fall local elections. 

SZ also succeeded in Prague, winning six seats on the Prague City Council. More importantly, Greens gained executive positions in the national government and in the two largest cities in the country - Prague and Brno - in addition to posts in a number of smaller towns and villages. 

It all began in June 2006 when the Czech Greens received 6.29 percent for the lower House of Deputies, the lower house of Czech Parliament. Only five percent is needed to win seats. After winning six seats, the Czech Republic joined Latvia in being the only East and Central European countries with Greens as country-wide lawmakers.

Just seven months later, the Greens became one of three parties forming a coalition government to run the Czech Republic. This occurred after an unlikely result in the June election produced a rare 100 to 100 tie between two multi-party coalitions seeking to govern.

The Czech Civic Democratic Party (ODS) won the most seats (although not a majority) enabling them to form a government. Negotiations began almost immediately with the Greens part of the initial formulation. Those talks fell apart however, and for many months negotiations continued without the Greens. Then on December 28th a coalition was announced between the ODS, the Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) and the Green Party, with ODS chairman Mirek Topolanek as Prime Minister.

As part of this agreement, the Greens received four of the 18 minister seats. Martin Bursik (party chair) is now the Deputy Prime Minister of Environ­ment, Dana Kuchtova (first deputy party chair) the Minister of Education, Karel Schwartzenberg the Minister for Foreign Affairs (secretary of state), and Dzamila Stehlikova (deputy chairperson) the Minister of Equal Opportunity. 

SZ also received a key policy concession - the halting of any more nuclear power plants, an achievement which received widespread praise. According to Bursik the deal is "worded in a way that the government will not support, nor plan the construction of new nuclear units." 

State-owned Czech power utility CEZ runs two reactors with combined capacity of 2,000 megawatts at the Temelin nuclear plant in south Bohemia, only 45 miles from the Austrian border. CEZ had been considering an expansion of the plant. The expansion was opposed by a large grassroots movement in Austria that even had been planning blockades of border crossings between the two nations before receiving news of the Greens-led anti-nuclear coalition accord. 

"I would like to express our heartfelt congratulations to the Czech Greens on entering government and especially for having negotiated significant Green achievements in the coalition agreement: stopping the planning and building of extensions to the nuclear power station Temelin," said Austrian Green Ulrike Lunacek, co-spokes­person of the European Green Party.

The previous Czech Social Democrat-led government had considered expanding Temelin. Now with the Green influence in the new government, it will not happen - if the government is able to stay in power for its four-year term. 

Under the Czech constitution, Topolanek has to seek a confidence vote for his Cabinet within 30 days. The result is uncertain, because with only half of the 200 lawmakers in parliament, he will have to rely on defectors from opposition parties to govern.

This is the second time Topolanek has tried to form a government. On September 4th, he attempted a one-party minority Cabinet, but that government resigned Oct. 11 after losing a confidence vote in parliament. Under election rules, three failed attempts to form a government, leads to a new election. 

Greens ran their campaign on changing the quality of life. They targeted not just activists but families with children and the well-to-do segment of society that traditionally votes more conservatively. The outcome affirmed the strategy: Greens received votes from both first-time voters and higher-income citizens. 

The main campaign issues were: equal opportunity for women, minorities and other groups facing discrimination, environmental tax reform which focused on a shift from fossil and nuclear energy sources to renewable energy, a shift from trucks to rail for goods transport, improved quality of life through a reduction in pollution, global warming prevention, and nature conservancy. Greens focused on a gradual social change careful not to threaten the middle class rather than use radical rhetoric of social revolution. Reaching out to people living around and under the national income average and people living in poverty will be a challenge for the next election cycle. 

Party chair Bursik, an experienced politician who was briefly Environmental Minister as an independent in 1998, led the campaign. Bursik joined the Green Party in 2004 and is widely credited as bringing together an internally fractured party to effectively communicate its message. Head of a Prague-based sustainable energy-consulting firm called Ecoconsulting, he was elected party chair in September 2005, and crisscrossed the country with a backpack on public transportation making the Greens' case.

It was Katerina Jacques who received the most votes for the House of Deputies. Jacques gained national fame when police brutally beat her up during an anti-Nazi rally. Images of her bruised face flooded the media and helped raise her to national prominence. But this wasn't the first time she was beaten by police. In 1989 as an 18 year old human rights defender, she was one of the hundreds who confronted police during the student protests leading up to the 1989 Velvet revolution that overthrew the then-Communist government as part of the opening up of Eastern Europe.

The Green Party in the Czech Republic was founded in 1990 and received 4.1% in parliamentary elections that year, just short of the 5 percent needed to win seats. They did however win seats on city councils across the country and in 1992, won three parliamentary seats in a coalition with the Czechoslovak Socialist Party and the Agricultural Party. But by the mid 1990s, internal strife divided the party and it wasn't until several years later the party revived itself. 

In the spring of 2002, then party chair Miroslav Rokos, appealed to activists to cooperate in order to help the Greens succeed in the national parliamentary elections. Although they failed to win a seat, Greens reached the threshold necessary to receive state financial support. The "Green 50" (later called "The Dark Green Appeal"), a mix of activists, intellectuals, and journalists, entered the Party in 2003.

The reinvigorated Greens made substantial progress in fall 2002 elections, winning seats on local City Councils in Prague, Brno, Northern Bohemia, and elsewhere in the country, including three mayoral appointments. In June 2004 the Czech Greens ran for European Parlia­ment seats and obtained 3.16 percent of the vote, but no seats. Human rights activist and journalist Jaromir Stetina, was the most successful candidate with the highest amount of preferential votes and was subsequently elected to the Czech Senate in November 2004.

Petr Stepanek is a university lecturer and an environmental consultant, and currently serves as a City Commissioner for the Environment in Prague.

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