Diabolic Campaign – Czech Social Democrats Trying to Make Their Return (Or Not)

In the second half of September, one of the established political parties - the Social Democrats - came up with a new political campaign called “Humanity rather than selfishness”, through which they would like to return to the Czech (and European) political scene after failing to win enough votes to get into the Chamber of Deputies in the last elections for the first time from their rejuvenation in 90’s after the Velvet revolution.

The campaign, however, has caused mixed feelings and a stir, especially the visual part of it – in a comic-like fashion, the current chairman of the Social Democrats appears as a positive alternative to the current prime minister (Civic Democratic Party), whose likenesses include painted tongue out, devil horns and tail, making it look like they've been painted on by some passerby (image available here). Commenting that "it's time for two old rivals to face off again after all these years" – Social Democrats and the Civic Democrats were the two major parties in the Czech politics until Andrej Babiš and his movement came in 2011 – the Social Democrats say the campaign aims to present the current symbols of selfishness and arrogance and to confront them with the values of humanity that the party upholds.

However, apart from a lukewarm reception or even criticism from the professional and non-professional public pointing to the childishness of the idea (and lack of any ideas and identity in general), Social Democrats encountered a relatively unexpected obstacle with the advertising company from which it had ordered the advertisement - the company refused to place the advertisement with the above-mentioned visual on billboards, claiming it was in violation of applicable law. The chair of the Social Democrats described this as censorship and fear that the agency would "mess things up" with the current government. 

From the legal point of view, political advertising is not overly regulated in the Czech Republic. There are no special rules on political advertising in the Advertising Regulation Act, but there are certain rules related to campaigns in various acts on elections to various institutions (Parliament, European Parliament, Regional Councils, etc.).

If anything, there are rules as to who can run the campaign and when rather than limiting the content, probably in order to preserve free competition between political parties as one of the principles of the democratic rule of law. As a result of such rules, this type of advertising - i.e. negative comparative advertising - is nothing new in the context of political marketing in the Czech Republic.

If we were to speculate as to what provision might be at issue (which the campaign violated), perhaps the most likely seems to be the provision that generally provides that election campaigning must be conducted honestly and fairly, in particular that false information about candidates and the political parties or coalitions on whose lists they are listed must not be published. The chairman of the Social Democrats sees the reason for the rejection as the advertising company not wanting to tarnish its relations with the government - he claims the advertising company is linked to the Civic Democratic Party (there have been reports in the past of the company being linked to one of the most well-known lobbyists who has long been associated with the Civic Democratic Party).

Since the advertising company’s reasons for refusing to publish it were not convincingly justified (it was merely a general reference to the fact that it did not comply with the law), it cannot be ruled out that the whole "case" is part of the campaign as well - after all, the news about this case appeared on the main evening news as well as on all the well-known news websites.

In any case, the success or failure of the campaign will only be determined by the elections.