TITS OUT FOR THE VOTERS

In a few months there are going to be parliamentary elections both here in the Czech Republic and in Britain. Maybe despite the historical fact that totalitarianism of one stripe or another has so often held the whip hand here, or maybe because of it, the Czechs, when they get the chance, have always shown a lot of enthusiasm for forming, and breaking up, political parties. Jaroslav Hašek, whose biography by Sir Cecil Parrott, is entitled ‘The Bad Bohemian’, was renowned for his pranks, one of the greatest of which was his candidature, in 1911, for ‘The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law’, which, regardless of its modest name, was just another of his scurrilous anarchist pisstakes of the society of the day. Some friends of mine were thinking of resurrecting it for the first Prague municipal elections after the revolution of 1989, with the major plank of their platform being the provision of more dog toilets; they didn’t get anywhere, either.

Among the parties that did get off the ground round then, though, and even prospered, were the Beer Lovers’ Party (no explanation needed) and the Independent Erotic Initiative, whose major policy was the introduction of more sensuality into public life. They voted themselves out of existence in the mid-1990s on the grounds that their programme had now been satisfactorily implemented; looking around the country as it is now, you can see their point. Especially when spring comes. The Beer Lovers’ Party has also disappeared; you could say their programme has succeeded, too.

Otherwise, political parties have settled down into the usual range of hues, ranging from the communists, who, uniquely among such parties in this part of the world, refuse to distance themselves from what went on before 1989, all the way to the Workers’ Party – I think the photo below gives a pretty clear idea of just which Munich beerhall inspired these guys. They’ve just been banned by a court of law, but an appeal is under way and, in one guise or another, will always be round to raise their shaven little heads and treat us to the brilliance of their insights into the human condition.


One novelty in the last year has been TOP 09, and if that’s not the worst name ever for a political party I’d love to know what is – talk about built-in obsolescence – who are the brainchild of Karel Schwarzenberg, formerly the foreign minister and a reasonably well-respected guy, despite such handicaps as a speech defect that is guaranteed not to make a positive first impression and being known for things like napping during sessions of the parliament. This was used by his opponents to ridicule him, but he turned the tables with a poster that showed him catching forty winks, with a slogan that translated roughly as “I only go to sleep when people are talking crap.” If that became the norm, most parliaments in the world would resound to the sound of melodious snoring 24/7. They’re never going to sweep the polls, but there may well be enough people fed up with the mainstream parties to propel them above the 5% margin that would see them join the parliament.

They’ve been in the news lately because of the inspired idea of a party member called Lukáš Grulich, from Brno, who’s clearly the kind of smart lad every go-ahead political party needs (and possibly a former member of the youth wing of the Independent Erotic Initiative), who thought it would be a genuinely brilliant idea to get female sympathisers to get their kit off and show their support – like this charming shot of a young lady, sans head, showing her own bust and holding one of Schwarzenberg.


If this appeals to you, there's a whole gallery of this kind of stuff here at the 'Karel is Sexy' website.

The party, perhaps unsurprisingly, has distanced itself from the initiative, as a notice on the website makes clear. My own first reaction was that this was political suicide, but that’s just the repressed Brit in me; it might be the case in countries as obsessed with political correctness as the UK, but in chilled-out Europe I suspect nobody really gives much of a damn, and it might really catch on in more than a few places.

In France, for instance, that publicity-obsessed wee poison dwarf Sarkozy would quite probably cream his immaculate designer jeans at the notion of showing off his trophy wife in the scud to his compatriots, and the sensitive mind recoils in horror at the possible ways in which the idea might inspire the terapriapic Silvio Burlesque-oni in Italy. In Britain, on the other hand, what would we able to offer? Jeffrey Archer and his immaculate back? David Mellor in his Chelsea shirt? Various male peers of the realm in stockings and suspenders? Margaret Thatcher in full-on dominatrix mode? In the interests of good taste, perhaps we should have a closer look at the Beer Lovers’ Party and their manifesto instead...