Time may be up for the Czech Republic’s long-held aim of using its own post-1989 transition experience to help other societies strengthen democracy.
We may be witnessing the dismantling of one of Vaclav Havel’s greatest legacies right before our eyes.
Speaking on an online talk show on 20 January, in true Elon Musk fashion, new Czech Foreign Minister Petr Macinka of the far-right Motorists party (yes, that’s their real name) railed against the vast waste in supporting nascent democracies abroad and said it would end now.
Macinka said that under the previous government the ministry splashed out foreign aid.
“I want to let you know what my predecessor, Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Lipavsky, spent money on … so that you know what Lipavsky was throwing away millions on, tens of millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of the money that taxpayers are struggling to send to the state budget,” he said. He listed organizations and names, pointing to the supposed absurdity of projects aimed at places like Myanmar, Bosnia, Vietnam, and Ukraine. A known skeptic of climate science, Macinka took particular aim at ecological projects (as well as several covering inclusivity).
Macinka said he had agreed with the finance minister to stop these “money-grubbing” activities. “I will not give them the money anymore. Today, non-profit organizations are crying about projects we have terminated on so-called environmental and climate education,” he said, adding that he would be happy to meet people from Czech NGOs “so that they can explain to me why the Czech taxpayer should pay for a media ethics school in Bosnia, when we do not have money for our own needs.”
None of this is really surprising since it’s coming from a longtime, close ally of Vaclav Klaus, the former president and prime minister, who practically founded the anti-NGO movement in the Czech Republic. And since the Motorists’ honorary chairman, Filip Turek, was reportedly one of the few Czechs to receive a personal invitation from Donald Trump’s team to his inauguration. And since, on a later visit, Turek met Musk and said he had thanked him “for revealing the USAID money flows, when … the Biden administration sent over 5 billion crowns [$240 million] to the Czech Republic alone to support mainstream media, journalists, and green and rainbow nonprofits in the last five years.” (Turek has another thing in common with Musk – appearing to give the Nazi salute – but that’s another story).
You can find a write-up of Macinka’s appearance in this infamous Czech publication, along with a list of organizations the Foreign Ministry has financially supported. Or watch the video on YouTube, which has so far racked up over 122,000 views and almost 1,200 comments, many of them nasty rants against “thieving, parasitic non-profits.”
Transitions is proud to be among the NGOs blacklisted in the article for our work countering disinformation in Serbia, by the way.
For background, the support we and others receive is through the ministry’s Transition Promotion Program, built around the core idea of the country using its own post-1989 transition experience to help other societies strengthen democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. As laid out in the ministry’s own policy document, this approach builds largely on the legacy of former President Havel, during whose tenure the export of those principles became one of the main cornerstones of Czech foreign policy.
The elimination of the grant program isn’t even the worst-case scenario: on the show, Macinka brought up a notion popular with the two far-right parties in the governing coalition, to create a register of foreign donors who support Czech non-profit organizations. If this becomes reality, many worry it could turn into a Russian-style foreign agent law, something unthinkable for this country just a few years ago.
Havel once wrote that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. The work of supporting democratic transitions abroad made sense after 1989; it makes sense now; and it will make sense long after the Motorists have faded from memory.
What Musk’s wannabies frame as waste, others recognize as investment – in alliances, in credibility, in the kind of soft power that can’t be bought. Dismantling this legacy may be easy. Rebuilding it, should the political winds shift again, will not be. In the meantime, those of us doing this work will need to find new ways to sustain it – and new partners willing to bet on democracy’s long game.
Jeremy Druker is the editor in chief and executive director of Transitions.
