Final Word from Wednesday, May 9, 2012

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Warning against extreme politicians is all the rage. Shortly before the French elections, The Economist referred to Nicolas Sarkozy's Socialist challenger as "the rather dangerous Monsieur Hollande." American commentators are debating whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is the radical candidate. Jan Švejnar says that Jiří Dienstbier is on the extreme Left within ČSSD. Dienstbier denies it but then says he considers today's Communists to be a conservative party. The policies of the Nečas government are a bigger threat to democracy, he says, and these policies are creating the conditions for the rise of some form of Fascism. While Jan Švejnar and even Miloš Zeman are trying to be consensual presidential candidates, Dienstbier is going out of his way to be divisive and confrontational. He's trying to make ČSSD choose between a boring but rather harmless Švejnar and a pit bull. Dienstbier even looks a bit like one. And in the case of this particular pit bull, voters have reason to believe he will continue to bite whenever he's provoked.[Czech Repubic Petr Social Democrats]