There is an election coming up here, and so every party has lots of signs up. There are billboards along the roads, ads in the metro, flyers pasted on every available flat surface. It’s
not like the U.S., thank goodness. Nobody has signs up in their yards or windows, nobody displays their political preferences via bumper stickers, you never see anyone wearing a t-shirt or a hat supporting one party or another. In the U.S. they say that you should not discuss religion or politics. However, everybody does.
Here, they really don’t much. The times I’ve tried to get my students to discuss politics, it has not worked very well.
In any event, I’m not too clear on the differences between the Czech political parties. The two big ones are the ODS and the CSSD. I guess it’s basically a difference between wholeheartedlyn embracing capitalism and the west and taking a go slow approach, because there’s plenty about socialism that people liked, too. If I were a citizen, I’d probably vote Green, because it’s a parliamentary system and you might as well vote for the ones you like best, and they are the old hippies, like me.
I saw an ad on the Metro this morning, though, which surprised me. It was for the Royalist party. Now, I’ve seen these guys before. They like to dress up in traditional costumes and have events with oompah bands and it all seems like a harmless joke. This ad, however, was written in full seriousness.
My Czech is not perfect, but I understood “a return to traditional, conservative values” and their slogan “God, King and Country.”
Suddenly, I realized: they are the Czech version of teabaggers. Just because everybody else thinks that they’re a joke, doesn’t mean that they don’t take themselves dead seriously.
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