Abstract
This paper explores the ideology of the Czech Greens, especially the part that has been overlooked in previous research: the ideological background of green activists who took over the party in 2002 and transformed it into something more closely resembling the ideal type of their western counterparts. The empirical question here is how has the structure of the Greens' ideology developed until 2006, when the Green Party achieved historic success in the parliamentary elections (6,29%) and how this influenced the ensuing decision to participate in the right-wing conservative government, led by the former principal enemy of the Greens, the Civic Democrats (ODS).
It does so in diachronic manner, using the theoretical framework of "New Politics" on the one hand, and the morphological approach to ideologies on the other. Four stages of ideological development between 1989 and 2006 are then introduced.
While some authors have claimed that the technocratic elites of the former regime contributed to the development of contemporary "technocratic populism" (Buštíková and Guasti 2018), this paper shows that former dissent also contributed to the burdensome legacy for New Politics by contaminating it with "moral populism". This influenced the ideological structure of the Greens at a critical stage of their development and steered them towards the model of "single-use" niche party in 2006.