By Ondřej Horký-Hlucháň
The current dismantling of the post-war aid system owes a lot to far-right politicians and political parties, with Donald Trump as the current leader of the pack. The Finns Party discussed in this EADI Blog is a prime example of their impact once they secure minister seats. The Czech case, however, shows that significant aid cuts can be easily initiated from a few parliamentary benches.
A Central European exception?
Compared to Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, Czechia sometimes appears as a pro-European, liberal island of Central Europe – at least until the upcoming October elections. The ruling radical-right populist parties in the neighbouring Poland and Hungary, Fidesz and Law and Justice,successfully managed to block and weaken common positions on migration, gender, and sexual and reproductive rights at the EU level. Yet a single Czech far-right movement, Freedom and Direct Democracy (FDD), led by the Czech-Japanese politician Tomio Okamura, managed to gradually gain support from mainstream parties to cut development aid from the opposition benches.
Moreover, if we set aside the recent support to Ukraine, over the past ten years, the Czech development cooperation budget has grown practically only due to new development instruments framed as anti-immigration. In this respect, Czechia fully aligns with academic literature that shows a clear influence of the far-right on increasing aid against migration, without being represented in the government.
Research also shows that the far right induces deeper cuts in poorer donor countries, but in theory, the total volume of aid should only fall once the far right enters the cabinet. Not so much in the Czech case. It is remarkable that far-right nativism and populism – prioritising “our people” and “ordinary people” over foreigners and alleged elites – ultimately led to a widely accepted, unprecedented cut even in the Czech humanitarian aid, usually seen as apolitical and already very low to EU standards.
Still waters run deep
Quite shockingly, the political rejection of development aid in Czechia has roots in the manifesto of the judicially dissolved neo-Nazi Workers’ Party. The nativist argument “we have enough poor people of our own” entered parliamentary debate relatively late, unlike in Poland and Romania, which have had higher rates of rural poverty at home. The first concrete proposal to shift 8 million euros from bilateral development cooperation to “our people with disabilities” and “firefighters and rescuers” was, for the first time, submitted by a member of Okamura’s Freedom and Direct Democracy party during the parliamentary debate on the 2018 state budget. At that time, the far right failed to gain any votes outside their own.
The debate on the following budget was already influenced by growing populist, anti-elitist resistance against the “woke” civil society. This time, the far right got the support of the now ruling right-conservative Civic Democratic Party, which normalised far-right positions towards the rest of the political spectrum. The final breakthrough occurred in 2020 with a successful proposal of the Communist Party to cut 8 million from the development cooperation budget, half of this for humanitarian aid, as part of a COVID-19 package. These aid cuts took place during a period of continuous increases in government spending and, until 2019, practically balanced budgets.
In 2021, an additional 7 million austerity cut to the humanitarian and development budgets was pushed through by the current centre-right, rhetorically anti-populist government of Petr Fiala. At that point, however, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, led by a liberal minister, had already resigned, and they didn’t even attempt to restore the aid budget to the previous level. It was therefore no longer the parliament, but directly the government, with no far-right representation, that solidified the Czech Republic’s position at the very bottom of EU rankings for providing official development assistance with a 0.13 ODA/GNI ratio on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Aid in Place” keeps refugees away
At the same time, these cuts were partly compensated by diverse aid programmes in the name of tackling the “root causes” of migration, and in spite of evidence that, in the long run, aid does not prevent migration. Yet, at the wake of the European refugee crisis in 2015, this political discourse came in handy to justify the refusal of the Czech government and the whole Visegrad Group to host refugees from the Middle East and Africa on their soil.
In 2015 alone, the government contributed 4 million euros to the controversial European Union Emergency Trust Funds. The Czech Ministry of Interior started the bilateral Aid in Place programme, officially the Programme for assistance to refugees in regions of origin and prevention of large migration movements, with an annual budget of up to 6 million euros per year.When the Supreme Audit Office challenged the effectiveness of the Ministry of Interior’s pro-immigration programs, the ministry replied that it was “self-evident”.
The government also approved a three-year 12 million Programme of Activities to Support Source and Transit Countries of Migration in Africa in 2020. Only one parallel programme for the Middle East was not framed by migration, but stabilisation and security.
Countering stereotypes on two fronts
The ease of the normalisation of far-right attitudes among the political elites was helped by the nativist and populist attitudes of the Czech voters. Regardless of where these attitudes originated, according to an unpublished poll, only half of the Czech population associated development cooperation with positive sentiment, and the proportion of “rejecters” (16%) exceeded the proportion of “supporters” (10%). This approximately corresponds to the representation of relevant political parties in the parliament.
More specifically, the nativist argument to “help primarily at home” was supported by two-thirds, and the rather populist argument that aid will be embezzled by corrupt elites was supported by three-quarters of citizens. The nativist, anti-migration, and fake “root causes” narratives resonated the most in focus groups. It does not come as a surprise that, according to Eurobarometer, Czechia has been at the very bottom of support for development cooperation within the entire European Union.
That said, policymakers at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs are eager for Czechia to get elected to the UN Security Council in 2032-33 by the votes of the global South, but they now face a double obstacle of interconnected negative attitudes from politicians and the public. The polls have shown that moral and geopolitical arguments do not work much with the Czech public, however.
The silver lining is the reported lack of reliable information on the effectiveness of development aid to counter stereotypes. The MFA started a series of annual National Development Days in the capital to raise awareness about development cooperation. However, it can hardly change the attitudes without allocating a substantial budget for public communication and cooperating with the public broadcasters.
Lessons learnt for the development community
While the dismantling of USAID, the transactional approach and the crackdown on migrants by the far-right US president are extreme examples, it is not an exception to the overall trends. Czechia is certainly not the only country of the global North that cuts aid. Anti-migration attitudes also influenced the EU development policy as a whole. These are precisely a result of the direct and indirect influence of the far right in many states, which contributed to the growing acceptability of these radical positions nowadays.
The Czech case shows how easy it is to turn far-right ideas into reality in a political environment and society characterised by stereotypes and a lack of information on global issues. The mainstream political support for the development agenda previously brought by Europeanisation cannot be taken for granted, and the hyped geopolitical reframing of the EU’s development policy as Global Gateway seems to find more traction with politicians than citizens.
The ultimate challenge for the development community, and its academic and civil society actors, particularly, is to counter the quietly mainstreamed far-right narratives. To do so, we need to repoliticise the debate about the largely technocratic development aid system earlier than our “Trumpist” rivals in an increasingly hostile and contentious geopolitical environment.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes
Ondřej Horký-Hlucháň is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and a former member of the EADI Executive Committee. This blog piece is a rewrite of a chapter published in the Czech language.
Image: Aktron / Wikimedia Commons