On Jan. 27, Miloš Zeman was re-elected for a second term as President of the Czech Republic. After the results were finalized, The Guardian published a piece lambasting Zeman as “far-right,” but upon his election in 2013, The Guardian had designated Zeman as “center-left” on the political spectrum. So where is Miloš Zeman on the political spectrum, and does it matter? The answer is that the standard postwar political spectrum does not easily fit politicians like Zeman. Zeman’s populism is his defining characteristic, and he is best analyzed not as being on the left or right.
The major axis in the Czech presidential campaign was the position of the candidates on European integration. Zeman stuck to the same populist messages that had won him election in 2013 and bolstered his power in his first term. He promoted Czech independence from overbearing Eurocrats in Brussels, from the bogeyman of Islamization, and from internal forces who sought to drive the Czech people apart. Meanwhile, Zeman’s opponent in the second round, chemist and political novice Jiři Drahoš, struck a pro-EU tone. Yet even Drahoš was reluctant to fully accept EU migration policy, and said that he would restrict the inflow of migrants to less than that of EU quotas.
The Czech electorate has responded well to anti-immigrant pledges in the recent past. In the parliamentary elections last year, the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy party scored nearly 11 percent of the vote; leader Tomio Okamura’s stump speeches promised “zero tolerance of migration” and focused on ending Islamization. It is no surprise, then, that one of the most distributed pro-Zeman slogans was “Stop immigrants and Drahoš! This country is ours!” Unlike Okamura, Zeman’s populist platform is not solely focused on immigration. Such anti-immigrant slogans are just part of his larger populist vision.
Populism is not an ideology defined by migration, even though populists have frequently established anti-migration and anti-Islam stances as the cornerstone of their support. Instead, populism can be termed a “thin-centered” ideology. This means that it has no coherent ideological structure of its own. At its most basic, populism instead relies on two basic concepts: “the people” and “the elite.”
“The people” in the mind of a populist are a construction. The populist defines an in-group and an out-group; you’re either one of “the people” or you aren’t. The “elite” is anyone who prevents the will of the people from coming to fruition. This means mainstream politicians, but also traditional liberal democratic institutions such as a free press.
Zeman has been dismissive of journalists in the past. In 2017, he suggested at a press conference with Vladimir Putin that there was a “need to liquidate” the journalists. At his victory rally shortly after his 2018 re-election was confirmed, Zeman “referred to journalists as “idiots,” and later, according to local media reports, several journalists were manhandled by his bodyguards, and one was physically assaulted.”
Zeman’s attacks on the media are not borne out of a dislike for the profession itself. One of his closest political allies, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, owns one of the largest media companies in the country, Mafra. Rather, Zeman’s anti-journalist stance is borne out of his attempts to people to the masses, as journalists are seen as part of the elite.
Zeman has made it clear that his vision of the Czech Republic is for a country that serves a narrowly defined set of the Czech people. In 2013 he invoked a duality in Czech society: “the part of society he represents and the ‘café society’ of Prague.” This thinly veiled statement is well understood by Zeman’s core supporters outside of Prague; the ‘café society’ is composed of the elite politicians and private moguls who have ruled the country from their perch for too long. Zeman wants to put an end to the oligarchy.
Slapping a spectrum-based label on Miloš Zeman does not accurately describe the sort of politician he is: a populist. His positions on migration, his treatment of journalists, and his disregard towards Czech political norms have twice won him election. These positions and statements are the common strands off of which he’s built his support, not some adherence to a political ideology or to a party. It will serve outside observers well to not see populists as a mere trend arising from within existing political standards. Instead, Zeman and other European populists are best analyzed neither as forming a new trend, nor as malformations of traditional politics. They are instead capturing the voices, hearts, and minds of a portion of their respective electorates, and they are doing it with more success that the liberal democratic order would have hoped.