Abstract
The article focuses on the development of Czech democracy in the past 30 years. The author shows how the close intertwining between the economic and political elites and the systemic abuse of public institutions after 1989 led to a crisis of democracy in the Czech Republic and to a shattering of citizens' confidence in institutions of the democratic state.
At the same time, he argues that this crisis has created the preconditions for the rise of populists and oligarchs after the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2013. He also puts this specifically Czech situation into a wider context of the development of the whole post-communist bloc and of traditional democracies in the West.
The author believes that the current rise of populists and oligarchs is generally a consequence of some weaknesses of the well-established Western model combining the political system of democracy with the socio-economic system of capitalism that the new democracies attempted to impose after 1989. According to the author, the current crisis of democratic states is rooted mainly in the unresolved relationship between the economical-private and political-public spheres.