Michal Cizek/AFP via Getty Images Unbearable angst of Czech being The Prague predicament: rich, safe but unhappy.

PRAGUE — Today’s Czechs are healthier, wealthier and safer than they have ever been. The economy grew at a robust 4.2 percent last year and the country boasted the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union. The EU's problems, from a possible British exit to the eurozone and migration crises, have almost no tangible impact on the Czech Republic.

So why is the mood so grim?

The country is in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis that culminated in the decision by the leaders in Prague to ask the world's English speakers to start referring to the country by a new name: Czechia. An anti-Islam party is poised to gain seats in Czech regional elections this fall, even though just 0.1 percent of the nation is Muslim. Gun sales are on the rise. Czech MPs want their own British-style referendum on EU membership, a so-called Czexit.

“The prime minister is weak, the president is strong but lacks constitutional power and the political class is divided,” said Jakub Klepal, executive director of Forum 2000, a non-profit group that organizes a major conference in Prague each year. “The whole state apparatus lacks direction.”

Existing gun owners are stocking up and many more people are looking to buy weapons.

Although the Czech Republic's detachment from Brussels and its increasing ambivalence about Europe hasn't gone as far as to produce the outright hostility to the EU found in Poland and Hungary today, the case of Moravian melancholy leaves Brussels without an especially effective partner in Prague.

Numbers behind the gloom

Getting a grip on what ails the Czechs is difficult, but clues exist in recent opinion polls.

In one, 80 percent of Czechs — statistically some of the least religious people in the world — say they fear Islam. Though apprehensions about multiculturalism are found across Europe, in the Czech case it comes despite almost no experience of mass immigration; the country’s largest foreign community is Ukrainian, accounting for less than 1 percent of the population. President Miloš Zeman seized on the issue, saying earlier this year: "The integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible.”

Another poll released at the end of April by the CVVM agency found that just 37 percent of Czechs trust the European Union. Trust in NATO and the U.N. was about 50 percent — down 12 and 15 percentage points, respectively, since last year. Czechs have long distrusted their own leaders and now appear nearly as skeptical of the international institutions they spent so long trying to join.

In a sign of pervasive unease, some have taken security into their own hands. A recent analysis by the daily Hospodářské noviny found that some 13 percent of all privately owned guns were purchased in the past five years, with nearly 10 percent of all gun licenses registered in the last six months of 2015. In short, existing gun owners are stocking up and many more people are looking to buy weapons.

"Part of this sense of vulnerability comes because it feels like we are giving up some of our values” — Adéla Dražanova, journalist

Such rapid shifts in public opinion spur unpredictable politics. Although no one has acted on it yet, the idea of a Czexit referendum on EU membership pops on and off parliament's agenda.

It’s prompting unusual shifts in foreign policy. During a March visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Zeman used an interview with China’s state run CCTV to criticize what he said was unnecessary hostility from previous Czech governments toward Beijing, and blamed it on “pressure from the United States and European Union.”

“Now we are again an independent country and formulate our own foreign policy, which is based on our own interests,” he said.

Xi’s three-day visit drew comparisons with a 1978 trip by Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader whose country occupied the Czech lands for decades. Zeman’s words were taken as a sign that he is trying to push the country away from the West towards China or Russia. The same was said when he attended last year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow.

No national identity

Unlike the case with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, whose policies are rooted in nationalist projects, Zeman appears to be motivated largely by a desire to annoy Prague elites.

Similar to other Central European nations, the Czech Republic spent its first decades after communism ended working to join NATO and the EU and to transform a socialist economy into a capitalist one. Now that those goals have been achieved, Prague appears to be drifting.

That leaves scope for internal political battles that are incomprehensible to most outsiders, like Zeman’s long-cultivated disdain for his prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, who helped block Zeman from a presidential run in the early 2000s.

“He is intentionally pouring oil on the fire,” said Alexandr Vondra, a former foreign minister and Czech ambassador to the United States, as well as Zeman’s political foe.

Though the ultimate sign of European belonging, Schengen also represents “a loss of control."

In late May, Zeman dispatched a top aide to meet with leaders from the Bavarian arm of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, defying Sobotka. Part provocation and part power play by Zeman, this sort of political jousting is indicative of a broader national mood.

“The divisions are the strongest I remember,” said Adéla Dražanova, a journalist with Reporter magazine. “It’s not only because of Zeman. Part of this sense of vulnerability comes because it feels like we are giving up some of our values.”

The Czechs are in a state of “psychosocial uncertainty,” said Benjamin Tallis, a scholar at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. “‘I am still here but my country has gone West,’ is the feeling for some of these people. After 1989 and this great moment of national resurgence it became about a return to Europe, which is also at the same time about sacrificing national feeling.”

Discontent with a metaphorical move West is not matched by renewed affinity for the East. A May survey by the Institute for Public Affairs, an independent think tank based in neighboring Slovakia, found that just 17 percent of Czechs trust Russia, with 52 percent saying they actively distrust Moscow.

This feeling of dislocation hasn't been helped by the entry into the passport-free Schengen zone. Though the ultimate sign of European belonging, Schengen also represents “a loss of control,” Tallis said, and the migration crisis has reminded people of this.

For the better part of the first two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two Václavs dominated Czech political life: Václav Havel and Václav Klaus. Havel touted a sort of idealist, human rights driven view of the world. Klaus was the hard political realist. Both men are gone, and Czechs appear skeptical of the two approaches.

In the aftermath of the global economic crisis, Zeman and the billionaire Andrej Babiš, the current finance minister, have stepped into the breach. They’re part of a new political elite that displaced the cozy duopoly of the center-right and center-left, which have alternately held or shared power through the Czech Republic’s 23 years as an independent state.

New brooms

Vondra called the new pair “corporatists,” but whatever the label they have set about displacing the traditional leadership class. The resulting turmoil has opened up space for others, including a newly formed anti-Islam party — the Alternative for the Czech Republic — that looks set to pick up seats in regional elections this fall.

Political confusion comes with some linguistic confusion as well. Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek announced in April that the country planned to request that the U.N. register "Czechia" as one of the country’s official names in English. "It is not good if a country does not have clearly defined symbols or if it even does not clearly say what its name is," Zaorálek said at the time.

It appears the country's leaders didn't like its name in English and opted for something simpler, choosing Česko, a somewhat literal translation of the Czech language short-form name for the country. But the move came with little public debate, and was widely ridiculed as a symptom of a country uncertain of its place in the world. Some pointed out Czechia could be mistaken for the rebellious Russian region of Chechnya.

While Vondra called the change an “attempt to substitute real politics with games,” Tallis read more into it.

“In this ongoing drive to prove European-ness and shed this Eastern-ness from the past, the way Czechs are perceived by others becomes really important,” he said.