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ABSTRACT
In terms of political performance the Czech Republic of the 1990s was considered as a very successful post-communist country. Today's situation is different. The Czech Republic felt into deep political inefficiency. This paper aims to show the core and causes of the current crisis of the Czech politics. It briefly introduces the rather temporary and circumstantial success of the Czech politics in the 1990s. Then it analyzes the onset of the crisis as well as reasons, which led to a deterioration of the Czech politics at the turn of the 21st century. It recognizes three essential dimensions of the Czech political inefficiency: a crisis of confidence when it comes to politics, a crisis of the Czech party system and the weakness of the Czech parliamentary regime.
Keywords: Czech Republic, political crisis and inefficiency, confidence in politics, parties and party system, parliamentary regime
The Czech Republic is currently in a deep political crisis, although it is a country which in the 1990s belonged to the most stable Central and Eastern European countries in terms of political and economic performance. Many Czech politicians were proud of the Czech Republic's achievements and claimed that the Czech Republic became a model for other post-communist countries. In 1996 one of the most promi- nent Czech politicians in the last twenty-five years, Václav Klaus (at that time he served as the prime minister and the chairman of the then largest political party - Civic Democratic Party (ODS)), published a well-known article in which he made a comparison between the Czech Republic of the 1990s and the interwar Czechoslovak Republic. Klaus, among others, stressed that the Czech Republic, unlike the interwar republic, was a politically stable and efficient country.1
However, this optimism was not widely shared. Klaus's article prompted a reaction of a leading Czech political scientist, Miroslav Novák, who argued that the Czech political stability was only temporary and very fragile: Rather than flaunting our government stability, which is caused by a number of factors, some of which are only temporary, it is more useful to take such measures (in particular to reform the electoral system), which shall increase the likelihood that the government can keep stability even under different conditions.1 3 Novák's article was a short text...