Word of the Editor State Elections - It´s A Tie!

So it is behind us. It was a cliffhanger and it probably will continue to be one. The election was a tie. True- finally after 8 years, the right-wing parties won with the Citizen´s Democratic Party (ODS) in the lead together with the Christian-Democrats and the "Green" Party, who apparently have for now joined the right-wing. However, by some (for me) incomprehensible vote counting - those who won have the same number of parliamentary seats as those who lost! It is fifty-fifty, 100 seats to 100 seats. Thus very complicated negotiations had to start to form a government.

Of course- what came before all this was like a horrible dream. The hysterical leftwing Prime Minister kept shouting and fighting like in a last (hopefully) epileptic seizure as though his life was at stake. But it was not, only his power was in danger. Yvonne Premusilova, the hostess of a news program of the popular editor Mr. Cibulka said that "Paroubek is trying to play Mussolini". Mr Cibulka was immediately replaced as editor. (The same thing happened recently to a public television broadcast when it aired a very mild criticism of the Prime Minister.) Obviously, the power of one small Napoleon was projected even into the public news sector, by which I mean the subservience of our media whose leaders are afraid of losing their jobs, but also our hopelessly inefficient police and legal system lead by the impossible Mr. Bublan, who are unable to thoroughly investigate hardly anything, our judicial system, etc., etc. One could fill a volume- but such books are already being written by others. I just like to remind you that our courts recently took away children from their mother´s arms and sent them"lawfully" to Argentina to their father, whom they do not know at all and whose language they do not speak. The children were screaming and crying, the mother was trying to hold on to them and was consequently charged with kidnapping. Whatever the parents had been fighting about, the judge who decided "legally" against the children should be locked up in a solitary cell and get only bread and water for a long, long time.

Our police and courts are good at this-they have courage when it comes to children. Not so when they have to deal with corruption scandals that were connected with the ruling social democratic party (CSSD). So far nothing was ever investigated and clarified. The Prime Minister only called the few arrested people from his political party "tricksters or pranksters". All of this clearly caused Mr. Jan Kubice, the chief of a special police unit called Division for Investigating Organized Crime to proclaim that: "Organized crime has penetrated state administration and politics." And he accused the governing party of purposely covering up any case that would prove it. Of course, the social democrats (CSSD) headed by Paroubek immediately started yelling that there is a conspiracy involved and accused the Citizen´s Democratic Party (ODS) to be behind all this. And that and all the other bad things are their fault also.

After all, while CSSD has been so nicely and kindly and positively fighting unemployment (it actually rose by 8% during their reign), was supporting private enterprise( actually many thousands of entrepreneurs went out of business under Paroubek), and is solving health care problems (yes, their arrogant minister Rath caused during his tenure of a few months several strikes and demonstrations), etc., etc. Yet ODS is actually responsible for all the horrors of the world.

I do not love ODS, neither any of the other political parties, but I would like to write something positive in conclusion, namely that many more citizens came to the polls this time- many more than last timeand that they predominantly voted for rightwing parties- i. e. for freedom.