Still protesting after all these years

AS THE two countries that once made up Czechoslovakia celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution this week, they suddenly found themselves sharing a common mood: anger. In both Prague and Bratislava on November 17th, protesters took over celebrations of the annual holiday commemorating the demonstrations that toppled communism in 1989. The protests look set to continue, and while the causes in each country are different, the orientation is similar: dissatisfaction with corruption, and a desire for a foreign policy more oriented toward the West.

In the Czech Republic, the target was Milos Zeman, the president, who suffered protesters pelting him with eggs and holding up red cards (pictured) in a metaphorical demand that he be ejected, as in a football match. The protesters were angered by his recent statements supporting the Chinese and Russian governments, and by a series of boorish stunts, including a radio interview in which he used foul language and sexist insults in reference to the Russian activist rock group Pussy Riot. Mr Zeman appeared unmoved by the protests, and indeed the next day his office announced that he had invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Prague in January. On Wednesday he stepped out of line again, suggesting to top generals that Czech troops should be sent to the Golan Heights to help defend Israel.

The protests in Slovakia, meanwhile, stemmed from a mushrooming corruption scandal that has forced the health minister and the speaker and deputy speaker of parliament to resign. The speaker, Pavol Paska, is the biggest casualty; he has long served as an enforcer for the Smer party of Robert Fico, the prime minister.

To many Slovaks, the scandal fit a familiar mould. In 2012, a public hospital in the city of Piešťany agreed to purchase a CT scanner for €1m. After Smer won parliamentary elections later that year, the party took control of the hospital board, cancelled the deal and announced a new tender. The winning bid in the second tender, by the company Medical Group SK, cost significantly more, €1.6m. Mr Paska happens to be Medical Group SK’s founder, though he denies wrongdoing and insists he has nothing to do with the firm anymore. The former deputy speaker, Renáta Zmajkovicova, led the hospital’s supervisory board.

The protests had an unusually personal tone; they began with hundreds of demonstrators gathering outside Mr Paska’s house, in the eastern city of Kosice. Mr Paska stepped down on November 15th, but the protests continued, drawing some 3,000 people in central Bratislava two days later. (Mr Paska did not help matters by labelling the protesters “anarchists”, a word that for many recalled the way communist authorities used to refer to demonstrators.) The scandal has raised the prospect of elections before the current government’s 2016 mandate expires.

That does not mean that opposition parties would win such elections. They have been growing less, not more, cohesive. Days before Mr Paska resigned, the opposition sought, and failed, to stage a parliamentary no-confidence vote. Mr Paska tauntingly advised them to “win an election”, noting they could then “do whatever you want”. As for Mr Zeman, while hundreds of opponents protested his speech in Prague, he received 2.7m votes in the Czech Republic's 2013 presidential elections; Prague was the only one of the country’s 14 regions he did not win. A quarter-century after the Velvet Revolution, aggrieved Czech and Slovak liberals and anti-corruption crusaders still know how to protest. But they do not seem to be able to win a majority of the votes.