American here, am planning to visit Prague for the first time this summer. According to weekly surveys conducted by *Morning Consult,* Petr Fiala has a [23 percent approval rating](https://morningconsult.com/global-leader-approval/) and a 71 percent disapproval rating. What has gone wrong for him? Surely he’s better than the opposition parties, right?

25 comments

  1. It’s mud vs shit situation, with mud being our current government and shit being the close second. We chose mud, even though it’s really just mud and people are surprised that playing with mud isn’t that fun but it’s still better than playing with shit.

  3. Because they are in charge during huge shitstorm – after COVID, after terrible finance minister and during war in Ukraine.

    And also because those fuckers doesn’t know how to inform and explain stuff to their citizens. And sometimes there are politicians in coalition who come up with bizzare ideas.

  6. They inherited a lot of shit from previous government, are dealing with war, raising taxes and doesn’t seem to be doing that much. Also, big promises about cutting down state aparatus are yet again turning out to be mere promises. Also, their PR ain’t that good, while Babiš owns a lot of media where he can trash them.

  8. Every single government during such economical crisis is unpopular. Czech economy is focused on export of industrial products more than most developed countries. Our industry has serious problems with prices of electricity and gas because of the war. There is economical crisis on half of the planet.

    Frankly, government can’t do anything. Raise taxes? People are angry. Don’t raise taxes and run deficit? People are angry. Cut some services and support? People are angry.

    So our government is trying multiple things out, but it isn’t really focused and makes people from whole political spectrum angry. Also they do not communicate well with citizens and lot of their actions are confusing.

    Still way way way better than the previous government and I will vote for them again. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about the current situation. International politics is quite great from them, but that’s it.

  9. Among other reasons others have pointed out…

    The govt is composed of five ideologically very diverse parties which decided to work together to stop a “greater evil”, i.e. the other two parties now in the opposition, which they collectively deem corrupt, populist and incompetent but that’s pretty much all they really agree on. For example KDU-ČSL (conservative Christian democrats) are now in the govt but so are Piráti (liberal progressive centrists) which under a more sane political configuration would be a polar opposite parties but are now forced to cooperate. Naturally the voters of either aren’t too happy with the other party’s being in the govt. It doesn’t help that for example KDU-ČSL is significantly overrepresented and Piráti are underrepresented (in terms of voters to seats ratio). Then there are three other parties in the mix…

  10. Because our government sucks. Thats pretty much it. Imagine this we were in a huge economic boom before Covid now we are literally reccesing in par with Hungary. And neither the current government nor the opposition really care about internal issues.

    Former Andrej Babiš leadership spend bilions on one-time payment for the elderly and creating stupid Covid regulations and really bad banking policy. Also they were sucking dick to Putin before invasion. And generally did things practically at random without no though outside of “if I do this maybe random people will like me”.

    While our current leadership snowballed the problems beforehand into a real recession of phenomenal degree. And then went to increase taxes, lower social spending and really absolutely stopped caring about internal issues focusing almost purely on European integration, Re-armament and War on Ukraine. And even if you say those things are good to do. The fact that we are economically receding makes those policies unpopular and uninteresting for median voters, not to mention this makes median voters more pro-Russia.

  12. Don’t forget that approval is relative. You might think that 23% approval is ‘so unpopular’, I’d say it’s just slightly below average.

  13. The trouble is that the ruling party is too centrist.

    For populist voters this party is too normal. Meaning that it is trying to save money and is not promising unrealistic things (like promise of peace in Europe)

    But the party is presenting itself like right wing party, but they are actually talking about tax increase and social benefits

    So they are trying to please everyone which makes everyone angry. Also there is huge inflation for which the opposition is blaming ruling party.

  14. The government has very bad PR. They are very good at foreign politics (especially with respect to EU and Ukraine) but they lack in internal politics.

    Natural gas and electricity prices skyrocketed even before the war and there is no sign of slowing down. They get blamed for inflation (even though the government has very little power to regulate it, the only way to at least slow it is to raise taxes – which is also unpopular).

    They have to do a lot of very unpopular reforms, everyone knows it but still hates them for it. Next government will be populist as hell.

    Also ruling parties identify themselves as center-right, right-wing and center-left, but according to US view on politics, all would be more leftist than Bernie Sanders (economically).

  15. It’s pretty much shit vs. diarrhea, while shit being this government and diarrhea opposition… And tbh I prefer to be governed by shit rather than diarrhea. Shit is usually predictable, diarrhea isn’t…

  16. Because “I look dignified and speak nicely and I have no major corruption scandal” is good, but it’s not a policy. Especially in the post-covid Ukraine war shitstorm.

    Sure, they inherited a lot of the covid issues (including a major tax break they themselves helped to implement), but that cannot be excuse forever. In outside issues, they go decisively with local mainstream and kiss up EU appropriately, so far so good – but at the home front, they do nothing but avoid, avoid, avoid while things go progressively worse. Because they either have no clue what to do, or they cannot reach consensus in the 5 parties clusterfuck of a coalition.

    Fiala would be quite nice to have in calm years of global economic growth, where the only things asked of him would be to look nice and be polite, reasonably handsome man with no major scandals. But today, he just looks like reasonably handsome damsel in distress.

  17. Inflation is insane even by global standards and when prices keep going up, not much else matters to many people. Sometimes I just stand there in the supermarket laughing at the prices. A lot of items have doubled in price. Petrol prices haven’t come down this year even though we’re one of the few countries in Europe still buying Russia oil although at least it’s down from the peak. And electricity prices are still through the roof even though the government owns 70% of the national energy company, which keeps reporting record profits because of the way electricity prices are set. I wouldn’t expect the other parties to do better, they’d do just as badly and do other stupid things, but that doesn’t mean we approve of the current government.

  18. Its basically because they have to navigate through multiple crises at the same time:
    High inflation, war, terrible state of national finances to mention few.

    Previous government (now opposition) was spending a lot of money they had to borrow and now Fiala et al. Has to deal with it. Obv, the “easiest” is to cut spending and increase taxes but for obvious resons, people like low taxes and governemnt spending on various incentives.

    There was a big spike in energy prices, partially due to the war but there was an issue with big provider goong bankrupt and they had like 1milion customers and they all had to move to other providers and they did get worse prices. I was one of them. In the meantime before i changed the privider I was assigned one and my montly advance payment was 10k czk which was like 500% increase. I was able to get a 2yr fix and my monthly payment “only doubled” which was ok for us (previous prices were extremely low and the prices skyrocketed due to war) but there are people that make little money and this kind of spike is realy bad for them

    They also have terrible PR. I voted for Fiala last election but there are only three ministers i know by name: Bartos for IT and shit, Lipavsky for foreign affairs and Cernochova for defence.
    Bartos doesnt seem to do anything but that might be just due to his agenda (that he is not visible in media). I like Cernochova and Lipavsky but the rest is invisible.

  20. Because they are absolutely incompetent.

    Prime minister: says how he supports Ukraine and on the other hand, blocks embargo on Russian oil

    Minister of finance: before ODS took charge if government, they were taking about how they have group of experts that will fix everything, after they took charge, they finded out that they have made a mistake and their ideas will actually save 60 bilion crowns less, to that they promised they won’t riss taxes, now they constantly talk about that and also want to lower taxes on gambling because of corruption and ODS mafia connections

    Minister of social security: government promised no to make any changes regarding age of retirement, now they want to change it and they also lowered rise of retirement pension

    Minister of justice: a literal mafia lord that intervents in criminal investigation of himself and his part

    Minister of defence: absolutely zero knowledge of military and I feel like she just plays World of Tanks and thinks she understands how to manage an army now, spreads desinformations on Twitter after Ukrainian rocket exploded in Poland, said that we want to get “something between” Leopard 1 and Leopard 2. She also said that military NEEDS airfield near Plzeň and won’t allow any private project there at any cost (except for VW batteries factory, that’s something else because bateries will help us with defence or something)

    EDIT:

    Minister of healthcare: anti-vaxx brainlet, his first decision in office was to cancel mandatory vaccination of old people

    Government also criticised “pre-election bribes” of Babiš that gave 5000 crowns to pensioners only to do literally the same thing (to parents) a year later because they needed to win local election.

    Virtue signaling of Vystrčil and Pekařová: they don’t have balls to do anything regarding Taiwan like accepting it as a legitime Chinese government and rely on empty political gestures that will give them political points among voters

  21. The government is great internationally in stuff like helping Ukraine. What they’re less good as is handling the budget and PR. Also some of their actions regarding the budgeting go agains the promises.

  23. ~~Because our great and mighty government filled with anti-populists decided to do literal opposite of what they promised, while whining about populism, yet doing the exact things the populists want, except half-assing it.~~

    EDIT: I guess to make it longer, more boring but informative… The current government is based on two election coalitions – SPOLU and PirStan…

    The latter is young progressives+ umbrella independent party(Pirate party and Mayors and Independents).

    The former is wide coalition of by now somewhat traditional parties deemed as centre to centre-right politics – Civic Democrats, the neocons and libcons(your Bushes, McCains and Romneys – the RINOs); TOP09, the liberal party but ‘fiscally responsible’, and Christian People’s party(imagine more socially conservative Dems, or maybe Bluedog Dems; party soon to drop Christian to become just ‘People’s party’ ).

    Those joined up as anti-candidates against Andrej Babiš, the former PM. It is all the rage nowadays to be the ‘anti-candidate’ – happening in Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, as well as the US(Biden is literally just anti-Trump – I reckon pretty much noone voted Biden cuz they like Biden, it was a lot of traditionally D voters and vast majority was just “anyone but Trump” votes).

    They have gotten a bad hand to be fair – despite good economic situation prior to Coofles, Babiš was spending like mad, hoping to buy votes of young and old by subsidizing things important to them. Then Coof hit and Babiš’ government strangled the economy hard for little to no reason. And then 3 months into their “reign” Russia invaded Ukraine, which came with the energy crisis in Europe. Still, it seems that foreign policy around Ukraine is the only thing they seem to do somewhat right and it seems to be the only thing holding the govenrment together and in power.

    All of their economic decisions seem to copy what the opposition wants to do, but they do it months late and half-ass it. And they spend the three prior months screaming about how they will not do it and how it is “populist and extremist” policies. After a year they turned back on literally every single promise they made in their election campaign programme.

    For their traditional voter they are invervening too much. For the opposition voter they are not invervening enough. So they are stuck in this weird middle.

  24. No, they are not better than the opposition, every single party here is in some way retarded. But you should be familiar with that when you are from the US.

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