In Czech Republic,

Milos Zeman was very pro-Russian and is friends with Le Pen and Farage and had ties to Jobbik. He denied that Russia has a military presence in Ukraine.  Zeman had stated, “I take seriously the statement of foreign minister, Sergei Lavarov, that there are no Russian troops,” in Ukraine.  Zeman had been consistently verbal in his support for the lifting of Western Sanctions on Russia and was against EU sanctions on Russia; one must duly note that Zeman’s chief economic advisor, Martin Nejedlÿ, (former executive at Russian company Lukoil Aviation Czech Firm -once the 2nd largest oil company following Gazprom) before it went into liquidation. Martin Nejedlÿ of Prague, a Financier owner of Fincentrum , a financial advisory firm boasting “more than 2,500 financial advisors” on its website with offices in the Czech Republic (Praha /Prague ) and Slovakia (Bratislava) , has a significant history of alliances to the Kremlin.

According to the article , “Brief profiles of Zeman’s close collaborators Mynár, Nejedlÿ “ (with no author noted in the Prague Daily Monitor ), the Czech Zeman Administration Presidential Office Head, Vratislav Mynár, was not disclosing his income nor his real estate holdings and had been the subject of much discussion and skepticism due to the fact that he had procured his position of influence without a proper and thorough National Security Office (NBU) top security clearance. President Zeman went on to state that Mynár could obtain and maintain a respectable position in his administration even without it. President Zeman gave Mynár several chances to appeal despite a previous court decision. Mynár’s declared financial holdings are estimated to be 100 million crowns, diversified in a portfolio of real estate, cash and market shares.

From 2010-2013, as Chairman of the SPO (aka Party of Citizen’s Rights created for Zeman’s Presidential Campaign) just five years prior to the Presidential Election, Mynár worked as an SPO regional leader unable to place the party with a significant standing in the 2013 General Election polls. And yet he was able to meet with his colleague, Martin Nejedly (Deputy Chairman of the SPO) who is also President Zeman’s aide in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In 2015, the Czech media noted that Nejedly had a diplomatic passport” issued by Jan Kohout the former Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs (with former ties to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the Social Democratic Party) but that he had no proper clearance to receive it -arousing further speculation.  ( http://www.praguemonitor.com/2018/01/15/brief-profiles-zemans-close-collaborators-mynář-nejedlý )

Worker’s Party of Social Justice – aka. DSSS- Dēlnické Strany Sociálni Spravedlnosti was the most powerful Right Wing organization / party platform in the Czech Republic, receiving almost 2% of the vote. The DSSS refers to itself as anti-gypsyist and “anti-Roma criminality”-meaning that they believe that the majority of the Czech Republic’s citizenry does not engage in political discourse but rather that non-local , foreigners do and in doing so, dismantle the ideals that the Czech people who believe in generations of tradition and its preservation hold dear. Let us be clear that this is a powerful rhetoric repeated as Mantra throughout Russia and all of Eastern Europe by Right Wing Ideologues. “Tradition” sounds so quaint….like historic preservation in some lovely town but in this instance, it is dangerous Orwellian doublespeak. It means that no new ideas can ever enter a discussion no matter how good they may be at protecting a Democracy. The crude reality is that this seemingly tame Right Wing rhetoric is used to disguise the crude reality of agoraphobia meshed with xenophobia. The “ordinary” people they allegedly fight for show a disdain for the political process and the Democracy they pretend to defend. Like the tea party in the United States and “Joe the Plumber” latching onto the McCain/Palin 2007 message, they show anger towards the “political elite”, the “college educated” regardless to whether they were raised in working class households- as they were no longer the ordinary people who could latch onto the simple rhetoric of Conservative mantra. If you were exposed to that thought broken from the shackles of tradition, you were no longer with the ordinary people of the Czech Republic and your soul was now polluted, corrupted by dominant liberal ideologies of universities that evolved from the struggles of escaping communism while seeking empathetic approaches to alleviating societal problems.

Before DSSS (aka Dēlnické Strany Sociálni Spravedlnosti) , there existed the DS (aka Dēlnické Strany , The Worker’s Party) before 2010 when it was dismantled by the court ruling given the public’s perception of it as a hate group. They re-emerged in 2010 with the same name but added “Social Justice” to their title to appear more Democratic.  In changing their name after being disbanded they went from 1% of the vote to 2% of the vote by 2012. Going up by one percentage point within two years is not terribly menacing but the issue is their exposure on television fueling the thought of traditional establishment Conservative groups not paying attention to the polls but unwittingly co-opting their platforms. Their relevance is that their rabid radicalism aligned with eugenics, Ethnic cleansing , and public calls for violence towards other cultures  influences the ideology of other Conservative parties closer to attaining power; Hence, that in and of itself, is dangerous.

(Miroslav Mareš , Right Wing Extremism in the Czech Republic  http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/id-moe/09347.pdf )

Now push forward through the political fog of five years later to 2017 and to when the Conservatives had their anti-establishment party candidate propped by Russian Oligarchs who ran a parallel campaign to Trump:  63-year-old Andrej Babiš the media and agribusiness mogul and second richest man in the Czech Republic.  He was tough talking and chaotic with the charisma to entertain those bored by politics enough to vote for change even if it was linked to destabilizing uncertainty (no matter how nefarious its associations.)  Like Trump, he attracted the nihilists and older generation who never voted before and had had enough with every political party out there while having had attracted others impressed by his wealth without questioning his lack of transparency in corporate dealings.  Filmmaker and social critic, Michael Moore, had oftentimes called Trump the “molotov cocktail” for people tired of the same old political establishment.; Babiš is the Czech Republic’s molotov cocktail …. And Russia was behind his win with 30 percent of the vote. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/world/europe/andrej-babis-ano-czech-election.html )

Like Trump, Babiš was more liberal in his earlier years as a card carrying member of the Communist Party for nearly the entire decade of the 1980’s before becoming a member of ANO ( “Yes” in Czech) from 2011 onward ( after the dissolving of the National Party aka Far Right Nationalist Party and its paramilitary guard which offered the “final solution” to gypsy immigration).  The Oligarchs were active in facilitating the Conservative effort; Many referred to ANO as Centrist and Populist but it was Center Right . It’s mantra was “Yes, it will get better”… derived four years after then US Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama , had used the campaign slogan, “Yes, We Can”. It appeared as if some political mastermind in Eastern Europe had noted Obama’s meteoric rise by appealing to both the sensibilities of Liberals as well as Conservatives.  ANO was an offshoot of an earlier movement known as Action of Dissatisfied Citizens.  Once again, like Trump, Babiš , “gamed” the anger of the populace and inspired them to vote without having a consistent ideology; voters merely extrapolated the emotive soundbite they preferred such as fear of widespread immigration and courted it in their decision for the ballot box while ignoring his questionable character of government corruption based on his misuse of EU subsidies.  In addition to this , when the media looked into financial dealings of tax crimes in 2017 and his subsequent indictment in October of the same year,  he had stated that he had been targeted by politically motivated disinformation (much in the same way Trump had touted,“Fake News!”)  (  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/world/europe/andrej-babis-ano-czech-election.html. )

ALLIANCE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM MEMBERS

Tomas Vandas – Member
Czech Republic – DSSS

American Matthew Heimbach went to Czech Republic in September 2016 to speak at a Worker’s Party of Social Justice meeting where he claimed that Americans “shared blood, heritage and destiny” with Europeans.[i]

[i] Alan Feuer, Andrew Higgins, New York Times, “Extremists turn to a leader to protect western values: Vladimir Putin”, December 3, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/world/americas/alt-right-vladimir-putin.html?mcubz=0