“People are not commodities”, says one of the key principles of Social Democratic policy. The Greens say that nature is not a commodity. The Christian Democrats agree with both, with some variations. In the case of green policies, the principle of decommodification — limiting the influence of the market on a given area — is a way to gain coalition partners.
Today, the Czech Social Democrats are definitely not a party linked with healthy lifestyles and sustainability. Young and, in particular, ‘green’ voters are put off by the party’s lack of will to discuss the future of the energy sector. Before the 2010 parliamentary elections the Czech Social Democratic Party supported both the expansion of brown coal mining in North Bohemia, and the construction of new nuclear power plant blocks.
While the Social Democrats’ new energy policy ‘only’ mentions “maintaining the existing nuclear power plants” – which means they are not planning to build new ones – they have not been successful in presenting this as an important point of their programme. The Government’s energy strategy, on the other hand, includes the construction of a number of new nuclear power plants. The debate on the future of nuclear energy in the Czech Republic is far from closed. The argument that also uranium reserves will be exhausted one day is not relevant.
In the Czech context, there are two factors limiting cooperation with the Green Party. Firstly, the Greens are not able to formulate publicly their own social policy; they mostly speak about topics such as support for civil society, renewable sources of energy, and direct democracy.
While their programme for the 2010 elections mentioned 70,000 new jobs created by making society ‘greener’, the Greens did not say how they would deal with the transition period when the same number of jobs would be lost and unemployment would first grow significantly in some regions.
Germany anticipates that by abandoning nuclear energy it will lose approximately 3 million jobs, while 3.5 million new jobs will be created with the development of new technologies. Without an efficient social policy, society may not be able to cope with such an extensive structural change.
Secondly, cooperation between the Social Democrats and the Greens is hindered by the Social Democrats’ status of a strong, self-sufficient party. With a few exceptions, its politicians say that cooperation between parties is only possible within a coalition government, i.e. after the Greens make it to the Chamber of Deputies. The possibility of forming a pre-election coalition has not been discussed.
Both the Social Democrats and the Communists support investment in traditional large building projects: navigation canals, highways, nuclear power plants. This is also due to the membership structure of these parties, with a strong influence of the ‘technical intelligentsia’ whose members often rely on their experience from the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, we cannot expect any pressure for modernisation on the part of the Social Democrats or other political parties.
In the party’s internal structure, environmental issues have the same position as other areas: there is a shadow minister and an expert committee for the environment, including a sub-committee for energy. A separate environmental platform called ‘Rampion’ also exists within the Czech Social Democratic Party. However, representatives of these structures do not exercise any significant influence over the party’s programme or its presentation to the public.
On the contrary, these structures face opposition from members. For example, a number of party members support the investment of about 500 billion Czech crowns to build a navigation canal between the rivers Oder, Elbe and Danube, although it has been proven that ship-owners would not use it.
When the administration of the Šumava National Park decided, in the summer of 2011, to cut down trees in the national park as a method to fight the bark beetle, environmental organisations reacted by a blockade in the area. After some hesitation, the party leaders expressed their support for the environmentalists, but regional party structures sided with the national park administration.
The following is included in the Social Democrats’ programme:
The Czech Social Democratic Party wants to invest in renewing the retention capacities of the landscape by restoring fishponds, wetlands, and curved water courses that were often straightened and diverted into pipelines in the past.
The 2010 election programme explicitly mentions legislative measures to create conditions for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2050. These should be based on investment into building insulation and support for alternative sources of energy (including alternative fuel vehicles).
Other points include the preparation of an act on environmental liability (applying the principle of prevention, the ‘polluter pays’ principle, and the principle of natural restitution) and an emphasis on regional and local referenda as a binding element in decision-making on environmental issues, i.e. issues having an impact on regional development.
More generally, the programme mentions support for local entrepreneurs, who can participate in revitalising the landscape, as opposed to major investments in nuclear power plants built by large consortia with global capital.
It seems that, for future election periods, the key argument towards the public needs to be: “Making life greener does not mean losing jobs, but creating them”. Czech industry is largely based on engineering plants. If they can produce bearings and shafts for nuclear power plant turbines today, they can certainly start producing the same parts for wind power plants in the future. The only thing they need is to start preparing ahead of time.
To conclude, let me mention a case that has been undermining environmental policy in the Czech Republic. It is the case of solar power plants, built on a large scale across the Czech Republic with state subsidies. While the original idea was to support local sources of energy (a couple of solar panels on the roof of a family house or factory), the largest portion of the state support went to big companies who built large solar parks, often on farming land.
Environmental organisations have also proved that some of these solar power plants were built with money taken from the state-owned energy company CEZ, and that CEZ used its money to buy electricity from the private owners of these power plants.
Therefore, the state’s inability to manage its company CEZ is a big topic in environmental policy debates in the Czech Republic. And, from time to time, accusations are made that CEZ managers, instead of managing the company, are actually stealing money from it.
This column is part of the Sustainability in the Good Society Online Debate jointly run by Social Europe Journal, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung London Office and Compass.
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SEJ Article: Political Strategies for a Green Society http://t.co/WShIkwRW