The first round of Senate elections in the Czech Republic is being seen as a catastrophic result for those who have long been fearful of a return to power of a barely-reformed Communist party. The party is unique in CEE for having never abolished the word communist from its name, but had until recently played the role of a noisy, but pint-sized opposition party.
In this first round of voting, the parties of the governing coalition were decimated, picking up at best 12 percent of the vote, in the case of ODS. This means that most of the run-off voting in the second round of elections will pit Social Democratic candidates against the Communist party hopefuls. In fact, the Social Democrats technically won the first round of voting with 23.5 percent of all votes (3 percent more than the Communists), but along the way they also managed to lose 75 seats in regional representations. The coalition government has reacted by promising to cut the country’s deficit, but it’s unclear how it can achieve this without demanding further austerity from weary voters.
