PRAGUE — Thirty years after the Velvet Revolution, Czechs and Slovaks are once again using mass street protests to shake up the political landscape.

Although today's protesters say they are inspired by the 1989 uprising that brought down communism in what was then still Czechoslovakia, theirs is a different fight: They see themselves as trying to defend the current political system — liberal democracy — rather than overthrow it.

The demonstrators say they are trying to fight back against creeping authoritarianism as well as widespread cronyism and corruption. If they succeed, they could reshape the image of governments in Central and Eastern Europe, which have been accused by rights organizations and EU officials of backsliding on democratic values.

But success is far from certain. Both in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the protesters are facing off against deeply entrenched political interests and leaders with substantial popular support.

And although they have plenty in common, the protest movements in the two countries are also quite distinct.

In Slovakia, nationwide mass demonstrations were triggered by the January 2018 murders of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, allegedly ordered by a businessman with ties to members of the ruling Smer party.

The protests forced then-Prime Minister Robert Fico to resign in spring last year. That led to the election of activist lawyer Zuzana Čaputová as the country’s first female president and inspired the formation of new, pro-EU political parties. In May’s European Parliament elections, a coalition of two of those parties, Progressive Slovakia and SPOLU, handed Fico’s Smer its first electoral defeat in 13 years.

Michal Truban, the chairman of Progressive Slovakia, said in an email that the murders had exposed “the dismal state of justice and corruption in Slovakia” and led to “a higher engagement with politics, which helps a movement such as ours.”

But now that the protests have ceased, the question is whether the new parties can maintain their momentum until the March 2020 legislative election and unseat the Smer-led coalition government.

According to Pavol Babos, a political scientist at Bratislava’s Comenius University, they can. “There is now a solid chance that the new progressive parties could form the next Slovak government,” he said. One of the consequences of the protests, Babos added, was “the incremental loss of power of Robert Fico, who is still the leader of Smer but appears to be losing influence.”

Smer has been declining steadily in popularity since the protests began last year, prompting the party's supporters to seek Fico’s ouster as its chairman. The man Fico named to replace him as prime minister, Peter Pellegrini, has threatened to resign if the party does not change.

“They understand that if Fico leads the party, it will fall in the next elections,” Babos said.

But Fico has declared that he intends to stay, saying: “I am not going away.”

Preparing for elections

To form a new government, the fledgling progressive parties will need to find coalition partners, such as the center-right Za Ľudí, which was formed by Čaputová’s predecessor Andrej Kiska after his presidential term ended in early June.

Last week, Kiska and Progressive Slovakia's Truban announced on their respective Facebook pages that they had held informal talks with each other and other opposition parties about the possibility of cooperating for the election.

“We are doing everything possible to be a leading force in a new coalition government after the next elections,” Truban said in his email to POLITICO.

“We know that people want change and the next parliament will be very different from the current one" — Michal Truban, chairman of Progressive Slovakia

In a desperate attempt to handicap the new parties, the government recently pushed a law through Parliament limiting the sources and amount of the private funding for parties, local media reported.

This measure will affect in particular parties who currently have no seats in parliament, such as Progressive Slovakia and Za Ľudí, who are also not eligible for the millions of euros in state funding that parliamentary parties receive based on their most recent general election results.

The stakes for next year's election are high, Truban said. “We know that people want change and the next parliament will be very different from the current one. The question is whether it will be a non-democratic system destroying alternatives or a new wave of politics that will re-energize democracy in Slovakia.”

Protests and pirates

Protesters in the Czech Republic, meanwhile, have drawn inspiration from the success of their neighbors. But the situation they face is more complex.

Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is facing opposition on many fronts, including from protesters calling for his resignation over accusations of corruption. A preliminary audit by the European Commission found he had breached conflict-of-interest rules in connection with subsidies paid to his Agrofert holding company.

In addition, Czech police have recommended that Babiš be charged with fraud over the alleged misuse of €2 million in EU subsidies for his Stork’s Nest resort. If convicted, Babiš could face up to 10 years in prison. He has denied the charges.

For months, the protests against the prime minister have been growing in size. The most recent demonstration was also the largest, with nearly 300,000 people protesting in Prague’s Letná park. It was the biggest anti-government demonstration in the country since November 25, 1989 — four days before the official end of communist rule in Czechoslovakia — when some 800,000 protestors gathered in the same spot to demand the end of the Soviet-run regime.

Benjamin Roll, the deputy chairman of the group A Million Moments for Democracy, which is organizing the anti-Babiš protests, said that the Slovak protest movement had been an inspiration for them. “We hope that something similar happens here, that new parties and new politicians will come out of our movement,” he said.

Yet Petr Just, a political scientist at Metropolitan University Prague, said that unlike in Slovakia, “there is no feeling among the anti-Babiš groups that there is room for a new extra-parliamentary party, such as Progressive Slovakia.”

He believes that the Czech Pirate Party, currently the third-largest bloc in parliament, may benefit most from the protests, saying: “When we see that most of the [protest] mobilization is with younger people, and we look at the voting demographics, we see that most of the people in their 20s vote for the Pirate Party.”

The Pirates are now polling in second place behind Babiš’s ANO movement with 18.5 percent, a survey by the Kantar polling agency published by Czech Television last month showed.

The government's popularity, meanwhile, appears to have taken a hit since the protests. The Kantar poll put ANO at 25.5 percent — its lowest level since 2016 and a decrease of 7.5 percentage points compared with March, the month when the anti-Babiš demonstrations began to grow in scale.

But Ivan Bartoš, chairman of the Czech Pirate Party, warned that the protests were not enough to unseat Babiš. “What is important now is that these protestors carry the message back to their towns and villages,” he said. “The only way to make them effective is through the elections. The protestors have to persuade others that there are better options [than Babiš].”

The next Czech legislative elections are scheduled for October 2021. Petr Just, the political scientist, believes that the embattled prime minister will serve out his full term, “unless something serious happens.”

Something serious might happen, however. Currently, a dispute over whether to replace Culture Minister Antonín Staněk has prompted Babiš’s coalition partners, the Social Democrats, to threaten to quit the government — which Babiš said would trigger a snap election.

And Babiš’s troubles don't stop there. Later in the summer, the European Commission is expected to deliver its final audit on the prime minister's alleged conflict of interest. In the fall, the Stork's Nest court case is due to begin.

“If the government doesn’t fall this summer, then the audit and the Stork’s Nest legal affair will be key moments,” Bartoš said.