Pepa from Hong Kong
Politics in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution has had more than its fair share of comical elements, but few of them, if any, can beat the sponsoring scandal that broke out in 1997. Even though Czechs don’t have a monopoly on lugubrious relations between businessmen and politicians (but they certainly belong in the European Champion League), the way these fishy relations came to light, was quite unique.
The farce started in 1996, when Václav Klaus’ Civic Democratic Party (ODS), which had played a leading role in all Czech coalition governments since 1992, published a list of its numerous sponsors. Surprisingly enough, among the generous donors were also two foreigners — one Hungarian and one citizen of Mauritius. When the media checked the names, it appeared that the Hungarian had died ten years earlier, while the chap on Mauritius had heard neither about ODS nor the Czech Republic.
The widespread suspicions that there was something rotten in ODS’ finances sharply increased when members of the party’s leadership announced that ODS had opened a secret multi-million account abroad. What followed later entered Czech political folklore under the name of the “Sarajevo coup” against party chairman Klaus: while he participated at a conference in the Bosnian capital, several party bigwigs asked him to resign because of the financing scandal. Klaus was hesitant, but his government fell, the ODS split into two parties, and the Czech courts started to sort out the mess.
A sponsoring scandal good as any, one might say. It was indeed — except for the fact that nothing was ever sorted out.
The indications that ODS actually has secret funds in a foreign country are strong, but nothing was proved under the legal clean-up that took place in early 2000. The businessman who hid behind the foreign donors had previously privatised a large steel mill, but investigators didn’t manage to find enough evidence to prove that his under-cover sponsorship was more than a matter of sheer altruism. Today, the ODS earnestly profiles itself as a law-and-order party.
But Pepa from Hong Kong took the cake. Asked by a judge about the millions of korunas she donated to ODS without telling the tax authorities, a female party supporter answered that the money was not hers, but belonged to a certain Pepa (Czech slang for Josef). Unfortunately, she didn’t know where he was living, because she had met him in Hong Kong. And no, she could neither remember what he looked like, nor whether Pepa had given her the millions of korunas in coins or bank notes!
To be fair — ODS is probably the biggest, but hardly the only, financial wrongdoer on the Czech political scene. Suffice is to say that for many disillusioned Czechs, Pepa from Hong Kong has become the ultimate icon of the political corruption and murky business climate that apparently flourished in the Czech Republic in the 1990s.
Personal Connections
Nobody will deny that it can be quite handy to know the right persons in the right places. Most people will probably also agree that, in a European context, the practical importance of personal connections grows stronger and stronger the farther south you go. Therefore, one might expect the Czechs to regard this phenomenon in more or less the same way as their Austrian and German neighbours.
But that’s definitely not the case. Because one of the communist dictatorship’s most characteristic features was the ostentatious way in which it bent rules and laws to hand out “advantages” to people who were loyal to them, personal connections became crucial to any slightly ambitious person.
Obviously, Party membership was the ultimate door opener to a high-powered career (it’s probably no coincidence that Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party had 1.8 million members, which relative to the country’s total population of 15 millions made it the largest in the former East Bloc after Romania’s Bolsheviks). A less compromising but still effective method was to ally yourself with a strejda (literally “uncle”, or an important person) who because of your personal relations and sometimes also an envelope stuffed with bank notes would use his influence to obtain certain advantages for you.
Because courts were totally controlled by the regime, it was often pointless for those who were discriminated against to take legal action (that is, unless they didn’t happen to be connected to an even more important strejda). Logically, the less people trusted state authorities, the more confidence they put into their personal relations — first of all their family, and then their friends and acquaintances. The Czechs themselves call this system “to have protection”.
Every reasonable person relied upon at least a handful of “protections”: you needed to personally know an auto mechanic (if not, your car might be repaired with used spare parts), a dentist (they were few and all working for the state, so why bother to do a good job?), a gynaecologist (some of them are still ill-reputed for sexual misconduct), a bookseller who put aside William Styron’s latest novel for you, and a nice teacher who fed your children with the absolute minimum dose of Bolshevik ideology.
Now, take a wild guess: did this system disappear with the communists? Of course it didn’t. Just as corruption, which is an extreme version of the protection system, still lives and thrives, so does also the importance of personal connections.
In fact, this tradition has become so ingrained that is doesn’t stir the slightest public outcry when politicians reward their ex-colleagues with prestigious state jobs or super-lucrative memberships on company boards of directors. When postings for Czech ambassadors are to be filled, formal careers and years of service are not always among the most interesting factors. Similarly, when a young woman was catapulted from total obscurity to a seat in Parliament in the late 1990s, most people found it completely natural, because everybody knew her political qualification was a previous stint as a private secretary for the party boss.
Needless to say, the protection system can be both a curse and a blessing. If you, for instance, find an interesting job announcement in the newspapers and decide to apply, you’re probably wasting your time unless you already have “protection” in the company. Logically, the more attractive, interesting and well paid the job is, the greater the need for a protector. On the other hand, if you only are a bit unscrupulous, personal connections can secure you huge advantages.
When, for instance, foreign journalists call a governmental institution’s spokesperson and ask some questions, they’ll probably get a useless answer a week later. But if they know somebody in the place personally, he or she might reveal tons of secrets over a few pints of beer in a cosy hospoda. In short: when it comes to personal connections and their importance as a tool for solving practical problems, the Czechs display a striking resemblance to those Balkan countries that they always take such great care to belittle.