Final Word from Wednesday, December 11, 2013
When someone talks about regime change, it's usually a U.S. official, and it's most often in the context of such past or current rogue states as Iraq, Iran, Libya or Syria. The connotation was therefore extremely negative when Václav Klaus used the expression recently with regard to the Czech Republic. The gist of his message both in a remark on his website and two weeks later on Czech TV was that the CR has undergone a fundamental change in the past 3-4 years. The post-Velvet Revolution era of a market economy and pluralistic parliamentary democracy has ended, he said. The political system is broken, he explained, and corruption has falsely been introduced as a pivotal problem of our time. In this context, it's worth looking back and examining what happened 3-4 years ago in terms of this false battle against corruption. Four years ago, in late Nov. 2009, the EU antitrust agency raided the offices of ČEZ, and Klaus spoke out harshly against it. If the regime has changed since that time, the ČEZ Republic was among those most affected. [Czech Republic European Commission competition directorate United States Television ČT24]
Glossary of difficult words
rogue state - a controversial term applied by some theorists and politicians to countries they consider a threat to world peace;
gist - the substance or essence of a speech or text;
pivotal - of crucial importance in relation to the development or success of something else;
to raid - to make a surprise police visit to arrest suspected people or seize illicit goods.