Final Word from Wednesday, October 23, 2002
News of Saddam Hussein's unanimous victory in Iraq's elections spread quickly around the globe as evidence of the lack of democracy in the country. Vladimír Špidla and his Social Democrats failed to learn a lesson from this. ČSSD's referendum for choosing its candidate for president, which began yesterday, raises serious questions about the firmness of Špidla's democratic beliefs. Not only is it possible to stuff the ballot boxes, as MF Dnes points out today, but ČSSD has also said it might not even respect the results of the referendum. Špidla, we've noted before, is willing to go to extreme means to make sure Miloš Zeman isn't his party's candidate. Perhaps he planned from the very beginning for the referendum to be plagued by fraud. This would make it easy for him to invalidate the results and pick his own non-Zeman candidate.