The 1993 Czechoslovak parliamentary election was held on the 19th September 1993 to elect 300 members to the Czechoslovak National Assembly. It saw the end of 11 years of governance by the OLS and the return of the ČSSD to power for the first time since 1978.
While Prime Minister Václav Havel had retained a narrow majority for his OLS-led coalition in the 1989 elections, he was forced to seek conditional support from the ČSL frequently, and its leader Josef Bartončík’s advocacy for socially conservative policies was considered increasingly archaic by both the moderate wing of the OLS that Havel represented and by the public at large.
When in the summer of 1990 President Dubček stood down and Havel announced a presidential run (winning a resounding majority in the election in September), the OLS was forced into a leadership election. Havel’s protégé Martin Palouš was pitted against Václav Klaus, and despite the overwhelming expectation being that Palouš would win, it was much closer than expected- 51% of the membership vote went to Palouš to 46% for Klaus.
As a result, while Palouš was now Prime Minister his mandate was questionable, and Klaus supporters pressured him into making the ardent neoliberal his Finance Minister. He instantly started implementing substantial reforms to curb trade union power, angering many left-wing Czechoslovaks. As the OLS became deeply unpopular, several allied parties which were closer to Havel than Klaus withdrew support for the party, and Havel himself accused Palouš of letting Klaus turn the OLS into a ‘cult of personality’.
Palouš did manage to retain power throughout 1991, including securing massive public support when he condemned the August Coup in the USSR and stood behind Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but in early 1992 Klaus’s new budget, including significant austerity measures, was voted down and a confidence motion saw the OLS government ousted. Palouš resigned the leadership and Michael Žantovský became interim leader.
However, it was not Žantovský who most of the public favoured to become the new Prime Minister but the ČSL’s new leader Josef Lux. Lux was very young at only 36, and had initially been a right-winger but in recent years had become a voice for Christian democratic economics. He was seen by most of the public as distant from both Havel’s establishment image and Klaus’s hardline neoliberal one; consequently, he secured the temporary support of the ČSSD, ČSNS, Coexistence and SZ (Greens) to form a government. It was the first time since 1957 a Czechoslovak government had changed mid-term.
Lux’s popularity soon declined as he came under fire from Klaus, who had easily defeated Žantovský for the leadership of the OLS after it went into opposition, and the left-wing parties criticized him since they felt he did not go far enough in reforming the economy, particularly with his acrimonious relationship with trade unions and his reluctance to return to progressive taxation.
With the right starting to severely fracture, the ČSSD was able to capitalize. Its new leader, Miloš Zeman, had carved out an anti-establishment populist image for himself by running unsuccessfully against Havel in 1990 and by pledging to reduce corruption, establish friendly relations with the new democratic governments of Eastern Europe and end the contentious economic policies of Klaus for good. When Dubček passed away in 1992, a speech Zeman gave at his funeral was very well received and helped heal divisions within the ČSSD. Furthermore, he also healed the rift between the ČSSD and ČSNS by establishing a positive relationship with its new leader Rudolf Schuster.
While the ČSSD was clearly the frontrunner in the 1993 election, two other parties had started to successfully establish themselves in the 1989-93 term and would secure seats in the new National Assembly. The first of these to be formed was the Rally for the Republic- Republican Party of Czechoslovakia (Czech:
Sdružení pro republiku - Republikánská strana Československa, SPR-RSČ), a far-right party similar to the SNS but mostly based in the Czech regions and aggressively anti-German rather than anti-Hungarian. Ironically, its leader Miroslav Sládek and the SNS’s new leader Ján Slota were noted for aggressively condemning one another despite the ideological similarities between their parties.
The other major new party of the 1993 election was the Democratic Socialist Party (
Demokratická socialistická strana, DSS), led by Zdeněk Mlynář. Mlynář described the party as ‘post-capitalist and post-communist’, and emphasized that it sought to build an egalitarian socialist society while making a definitive break from the kind of authoritarianism communist governments in Eastern Europe had perpetrated during the Cold War.
As expected, the ČSSD won the most seats (as well as setting a new record for the most votes won by any party at a Czechoslovak election), and enjoyed their best result since 1969 by taking 133 seats; combined with the DSS, ČSNS and Coexistence, this was easily enough for a majority government. The OLS and ČSL lost around a third of their seats, and Lux resigned as both Prime Minister and ČSL leader. He remains the last Prime Minister to come from the ČSL.
While Zeman claimed a massive mandate, he would soon come into conflict with President Havel, and the 1993-6 period is largely remembered for severe political gridlock.
(Apologies for the odd format of the wikibox itself btw, I had to split it in two to get around the file size restriction.)
