I made a new thing for my
Czechoslovakia TL!
The Bohemian National Council had originally been considered under the First Czechoslovak Republic, but it wasn’t formed as an independent legislature for Bohemia until late 1982, when the first Havel government divided the Czech National Council founded in the 1960s federalisation programme into two. In this form, it provided a start in government to Miloš Zeman, a populist critic of the Havel government who became Prime Minister after the 1986 election and would serve in that role until he became Czechoslovak Prime Minister in 1993.
Zeman’s government in the region became the main thorn in Havel’s side from the left, and Zeman used what provincial authority he had to fight against the privatization processes of the federal government- admittedly the control the federal government has over most financial affairs besides certain social programmes is quite tight, but Bohemian voters understood this and saw Zeman as a champion of the people.
The ČSSD would struggle to retain its popularity after Zeman took over the federal government, though, and his declining popularity on the national stage meant that it was only the OLS’s split and the formation of an even-handed coalition with the ČSL that allowed his successor Jan Sokol to hold onto control of Bohemia for the party. When the 1998 election came around, the Bohemian election was a major opportunity for the reformed OLS to prove its popularity, and former Mayor of Prague Jan Kasl became the first non- ČSSD Prime Minister of Bohemia in 12 years.
Kasl’s triumph would be short-lived for the OLS, though, as he fell out with the party leadership prior to the 2002 election and Václav Klaus Jr., the son of the former OLS leader and standard bearer of the party’s right, took over for the campaign. This went poorly for the party- while Klaus Jr. was able to capitalize on public sympathy after hostile news media mocked his deformed face, the ČSSD brought out one Miloš Zeman to lead them into the election, and this allowed them to easily win back control of the National Council.
After re-election in 2006, Zeman chose not to run again so he could focus on his 2010 presidential campaign, and while he would be successful in this venture, the Bohemian ČSSD would not be so lucky. The leadership of the OLS in the region was taken up by Karel Schwarzenburg, a major rival of Czechoslovak Prime Minister Iveta Radičová. Schwarzenburg successfully distanced the regional party from the federal one, in part thanks to a misfired campaign poster by the ČSSD. The poster depicted Schwarzenburg covered in rotten fruit in a parody of the famous painting of Bohemian King Rudolf II as the Roman god Vertumnus, mocking his aristocratic roots, but Schwarzenburg seized on the comparison, claiming he would ‘be the Vertmunus who brings on a new spring to Bohemia’.
Indeed, Schwarzenburg would win two terms as Prime Minister of Bohemia in 2010 and 2014 (with most of the OLS in the Bohemian National Council being loyal to him when he and Andrej Babiš split off from the party to form the PDS), but by 2018 the national picture had gotten more complicated. The far-right ČSS and radical ZaP were picking up momentum, and that year’s election saw the main left-wing and right-wing parties reduced to their smallest numbers in the history of the National Council. In particular, with the unpopularity of the Babiš government, the PDS came out the largest party with just 23% of the vote and were only 2% ahead of the similarly parlous ČSSD, with ZaP and the ČSS taking over 40% of the vote between them, almost as much as the two traditional major parties combined.
ZaP leader Ivan Bartoš managed to convince his party to support a centre-left coalition due to the hostility of PDS leader Jiří Pospíšil, and so the ČSSD’s Jan Hamáček became Bohemian Prime Minister. Hamáček initially fared well as PM, but his relationship with President Zeman declined towards the end of the latter’s term, especially as Zeman became more avowedly socially conservative and endorsed the controversial populist artist František Ringo Čech to succeed him. The killing blow for his leadership, however, was when it was alleged in 2021 that he had contacted the Russian government to request vaccines be provided to Czechoslovakia.
Hamáček denied the allegation, but public protests followed and his government was forced to resign. ZaP were favoured to take over running the government, but Bartoš wished to focus on federal politics and so one of his deputies, Matej Stropnický, was tasked with forming a grand coalition. This proved more feasible than it seemed- the ČSSD were hamstrung by relative closeness to ZaP ideologically and the recent allegations tainting them, while Stropnický’s father Martin was able to convince his party to support the new government.
Stropnický’s ascent was widely seen as a beginning to the ‘Pirate wave’ in contemporary Czechoslovak politics. Not only was he the first person associated with a pirate party to lead a government on the level of the National Council, but as a young, liberal-leaning gay man (and so also the first LGBTQ person at such a level of government in Czechoslovakia) who was personally liked by voters, he cut a very different figure to the average Czechoslovak politician.
There had been something of a lull in Stropnický’s popularity during late 2021 to early 2022 as the right began to shift its focus away from his politics and identity and towards allegations of nepotism through his closeness to his father, but by the time the election came around that July things had changed. ZaP had taken control of the federal government after a limp-wristed response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by the PDS Prime Minister Alena Schillerová, and the attempt of the PDS’s Pavel Fischer to chart a more conservative course for the party led to divisions within it.
The 2022 election would prove to be even more fractious than 2018- ZaP made gains to become the largest party (foreshadowing their 2023 success at the federal level), while the ČSSD declined slightly and the PDS split, with the anti-Fischer faction led by Petr Pavel (christened the Forward Party, VS) making gains at their expense. Stropnický formed a new coalition backed by the VS and ČSNS, which improved its seat count thanks to its leader Michal Šimečka voicing a vocally pro-Ukraine and anti-corruption stance on the party’s behalf.
A couple of notes on the electoral system: Bohemia has a mixed-member system where 120 seats are distributed across the regions by population with regional party lists, and a further 30 are elected to the national constituency based on the total vote tallies after all votes have been counted. Since this district is elected by raw percentage with no threshold, the national constituency is often a good opportunity for smaller parties to gain seats, though at the 2022 election only the eight parties that won districts won seats in the national constituency since they took 99.3% of the vote between them.
One other little quirk is that there is a slight majoritarian element added by the districts of each region- if a party wins a plurality of votes in any district, their vote gets bumped up in priority to ensure they win at least one seat in the region beyond what they would be entitled to based on their voteshare. For example, in Plzeň the ČSSD outpolled the DSS, but since the DSS won the most votes in Tachov district, they won two seats when they would normally be entitled to only one.
(And before anyone says, yes I know all of Vysočina being in Bohemia doesn't make much sense, but I used the current-day regions in all the prior maps in this TL so for consistency's sake let's just say when the Czech National Council split Bohemia took that whole region as a compromise for Moravia-Silesia splitting off.)
