Prague is now the capital of a normal Western country – alas!

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Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

If you open your window on a quiet street in central Prague the first sound you hear is the trrrrk-trrrrk-trrrrk of suitcases trundling across paving stones, as tourists walk to their hotel or Airbnb. (The Czech capital had some 8 million visitors last year.) As they trek around the Castle and fill the Old Town bars, these visitors – many of them probably unaware of the recent election victory of right-wing populist nationalist parties – may think this is just another normal European country. And you know what: they will be right.

Some newspaper commentators tell a different story. This is Eastern Europe reverting to type, they say. After Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, now Czechia as well! The truth is more interesting – and more worrying.

Thirty-six years ago, at the time of the “velvet revolution” in autumn 1989, people in Prague would constantly tell me they just wanted theirs to be a “normal” country. Back then, the prevailing Western normal was liberal, internationalist, pro-European; now it’s increasingly anti-liberal, nationalist and Euroskeptic. In the Czech election campaign, the incumbent prime minister Petr Fiala tried to mobilize Czech voters by warning “do we want to move toward the East or toward the West.” But what does that mean, when the West is U.S. President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, not to mention Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) and France’s National Rally (RN), all currently leading in opinion polls?

The likely next prime minister, Andrej Babiš, leader of the election-winning Ano Party, which translates as “yes,” is a billionaire businessman who was prime minister already. Troubled by lawsuits for allegedly corrupt past dealings, he is not a man of deep ideological convictions, but an “entrepreneurial populist” who goes where the votes are. Remind you of anybody?

More extreme are the smaller parties slated to be his coalition partners: the hard-right Freedom and Direct Democracy party and the eccentrically named Motorists for Themselves. The Motorists have proposed for foreign minister a former racing driver called Filip Turek who has a deeply unsavoury past record, including being photographed apparently making a Nazi salute.

France has historically been the country most given to looking down its nose at the eastern half of Europe, with what I call intra-European Orientalism. But, even given odd characters like Mr. Turek, Czech politics are a model of democratic stability compared to French politics today. And Mr. Babiš can look like a serious leader when compared with such farcical figures as Britain’s recent prime minister, Liz Truss.

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Thanks to remarkable economic growth since the end of communism, the Czechs now enjoy a per capita GDP which, when measured at purchasing power parity, is the 14th in the EU, ahead of Spain and Portugal. Czechia has the lowest share of population at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU and one of the lowest unemployment rates.

Thanks to the legacy of two great presidents, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the founding president of Czechoslovakia after the First World War, and Václav Havel, the founding president of the Czech Republic after the Cold War, it has democratic pluralist institutions that are fairly solid by today’s Western standards. They include a Senate that the incoming populists will not control; an independent constitutional court; and respected public service television and radio. These will come under threat from the populists in power, but an active civil society and the country’s President Petr Pavel will defend them.

Don’t get me wrong. Czechia’s right turn is a real cause for concern, particularly for Ukraine. Thanks to the initiative of Mr. Pavel, a former NATO general, the country has led a remarkable scheme to co-ordinate European purchases of ammunition for Ukraine, wherever in the world that ammo can be found. Now Mr. Babiš says someone else should take it on.

More broadly, the likely new Czech government will strengthen the anti-liberal, populist nationalist trend across Europe and the forces in Brussels opposing the EU’s green deal, migration and asylum pact, and almost any further steps of integration. Both Ano and the Motorists belong to the Patriots for Europe group, along with Austria’s Freedom Party, Spain’s Vox, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.

So let’s not get hung up on regional generalizations. Every European country has both peculiar features and strong common ones. The real challenge now is how to get beyond this retrograde new normality to a new new normal, which will certainly be different from that of the 1990s and 2000s. The message to take home in our intellectual roller bags (trrrrk-trrrrk-trrrrk) from the glorious city of Masaryk and Havel is that we, across all Europe and the entire Western democratic world, now have shared problems and must seek shared solutions.