Jan Šinágl angažovaný občan, nezávislý publicista

Prime Minister Petr Fiala: He has no choice but to give the contract to the crooks, is it according to the law?! Really "plaster prime minister". How many more blows will the "plaster" of the Prime Minister and the government take and endure - and how many more will the citizens take, bear and endure from these crooks who are destroying their lives and their future? The content of Lubomír Zaorálek's ten-minute speech at the SOCDEM congress is a shocking testimony to the times. It is not, of course, the subject of the public media. JŠ

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In the global index of clientelistic capitalism, the Czech Republic has quietly climbed to second place just behind the most corrupt dictatorship in the world - that of Putin's Russia. There is no worse comparison. And at home, do we still want to pretend that everything is fine and that democracy is only flourishing? Everyone seems to have got used to it, and perhaps even considers it "normal".

Former President Miloš Zeman, with the help of Justice Minister Maria Benešová, demonstrably organised the judicial persecution of his opponents. Zeman's predecessor, Václav Klaus, made it impossible to investigate dozens of corruption scandals involving his loyalists from the 1990s by announcing the most controversial amnesty in Czech history. The alleged "treasurer" of the whole operation and Klaus's friend Peter Kovarcik died when the police started to notice more than six hundred million crowns that appeared in his Swiss bank account at the time of the amnesty, when he allegedly slipped in the bathroom... Even that was not worth noticing for Czech politics. The latest example of the Czech imitation of the rule of law is the continuation of the scandalous saga of the double justice minister Pavel Blažek.