SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-August 1990
Page 31
FEATURES
omy!"
"Gentle revolution' defeated stalinism but left questions unanswered
to their identification as the party of the anti- bureaucratic revolution: but it was also a tan- gible victory over the Christian Democrats.
One factor here was the public revelation on the eve of poll that one of the main Chris- tian Democratic leaders, Josef Bartoncik, had been working for the secret police for 17 years, during which time he had informed against members of the Charter 77 civil rights movement, in which many of the OF/VPN luminaries, as well as President Vaclay Havel, had been centrally involved. Bartoncik had, so the story goes, been of- fered immunity from exposure by Havel if he stood down from his position in Christian Democracy. Bartoncik accepted the offer but then reneged on it, leading to Havel's decision to authorise public exposure.
However the KDU/KDH's failure has other reasons -they had been slipping in the polls even before the exposure of Bartoncik. Their East German counterparts, whose suc- cess they no doubt hoped to emulate, had the decisive argument of West German Chancel- lor Kohl's deutschmarks at their disposal.
The KDU/KDH however, had to rely on the purely spiritual appeals of Christian morality and the defence of the Czech and Slovak peoples against the horrors of homosexuality, pornography and abortion flooding in from the West. Especially in the Czech Lands, where the KDU got 8-9 per cent, the news fell on stony ground. Even a visit from Pope John Paul Ill in April failed to help.
The OF/VPN rather than the Christian Democrats was probably the party most identified in the voter's minds with the "West' not only in the sense of economic reintegration into the world markel, but also with an idealised vision of a tolerant, pluralist "Westem" society. This progressive