- The Czech government of Petr Fiala has ended its four-year term.
- Political scientist Jüptner praised the government’s foreign policy and energy changes.
- According to political scientist Jüptner, the government had little courage to implement reforms.
Government of Petr Fialawhose four-year term of office ended on Monday, was according to Czech political scientist Petr Jüptner, who is the director of the Institute of Political Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University in Prague (IPS FSV UK) to a certain extent rather maintenance-oriented and not very brave to make reforms.
In an interview with a TASR reporter, he pointed out that before these steps, which could be risky for her in terms of popularity, the priority was the effort to maintain unity in the coalition. He considers lack of communication to be the biggest weakness of Fiala’s government. However, he appreciated its foreign policy and changes in energy, thanks to which the Czech Republic is no longer dependent on energy raw materials from Russia.
“The government was not confused in its foreign policy, it had a clear value orientation and clear goals, and in some horizon it managed to solve the energy dependence on Russia. It is undoubtedly in line with Czech national interests and it is a very strategic thing that we may still appreciate in the future,” Jüptner thinks. As for pre-election promises and their fulfillment, the political scientist generally does not attach much importance to them. He pointed out that although the voters keep the promises, some groups – especially the voters of the ANO and SPD movements – will forgive or forget about the violation of these promises by the politicians.
According to him, the voters of the parties of the former Viola government are more demanding and hard to forgive. He recalled that they also reproached her for not having enough courage for the reforms she promised before the 2021 elections. “It was seen that the effort to maintain unity in the coalition is the strongest and it takes precedence over some risks. To a certain extent, we can describe that government as a maintenance government. It is difficult to find anything that it would not succeed in, and this in turn is related to the fact that it was enough about maintenance,” he explained.
However, he considers communication to be its significant shortcoming. “If Petr Fiala’s government did not succeed in something, it was communication. There is not a completely clear explanation as to why it was so. One thing is that it was a coalition government where the individual coalition partners did not want to distinguish themselves against each other in any way, and therefore communication was put on the back burner. The second interpretation is that they did not succeed because it was simply not their thing,” said the director of IPS at FSV UK.
According to him, the government harmed itself because the interpretation of all the things that happened in politics was up to the media or the opposition. Although he does not consider the previous Babiš government to be better from a management point of view, it is from the point of view of communication with the voters.
Fiala and the members of his government sometimes justified their results by a difficult period full of various crises – from the ongoing covid pandemic, through the beginning of the invasion in Ukraine to the related refugee or energy crisis. According to them, the previous Babiš cabinet had it easier because it had better conditions for fulfilling its promises. However, the chairman of the ANO movement does not agree with this, according to whom the former government is just arguing because his cabinet also had to solve various problems and crisis situations.
According to Jüptner, Fial’s government was not in an easy situation because at that time there was no clear economic growth that it could benefit from. And although there was a deepening of indebtedness during her rule, she tried to consolidate public finances. However, he does not think that it is possible to say unequivocally who had it worse. According to him, individual governments had diametrically different conditions and although they solved similar problems – for example covid, energy or inflation – it was in completely different stages.
