Rozhovor s Liborem Vondráčkem o Chartě 24, EU a praxí prověřeném protimigračním opatření

The EU adopted the salami method in the post-Soviet times. The method in which the frog is cooked slowly. But now the moment has come, when the Green Deal has been introduced. And that's a huge blow. The EU has cut off a big, very thick circle of salami. Australia has a completely opposite approach to the EU. While in 2015 the EU reacted to the mass migration of migrants by saying that Angela Merkel and other representatives said something in the sense of, we can do it, we will secure you all, come. And we think that if people learned a little more about this organization, they would know that it keeps all the benefits that the EU brings us. But it deprives us of those disadvantages, that is, the need to comply with all guidelines, the need to finance the huge apparatus of 55,000 officials in Brussels, the need to share the subsidies that the market owes us, which, of course, are not always just a gift, but often create obstacles for us for the future. So we create an object here, in the middle of our euro fund, but then we have to take care of it, and we take care of it from our public money. I am pleased to welcome Vibor Vondráček, Chairman of the Freedom Party. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, thank you for the invitation. Mr. Vondráček, a few days ago you initiated, or published, the CHART 24, where you and Markéta Šichtařová and Tomáš Zitka are signatories. The CHART critically reacts to the current state of civil liberties and rights and comes from CHART 77. Can you introduce it to us and say what initiated you to it? Well, we've been talking to Markéta Šichtařová for a long time and we've come to the conclusion that we're getting a bit close to what we call the cooking of the frog. And when the frog is cooking, it doesn't realize it at all, the warmth is pleasant for a while, and then, when it's too late, the frog has time to cook. And we said to ourselves that we would try to write an appeal that would refer to the previous CHART, which was the idea of Markéta Šichtařová. And that's how we would try to prevent the frog from cooking in our country. Because, unlike CHART 77, which came at a time when we were living in a really unfree regime, now we can talk about the fact that there are still some means that we can use to prevent it from reaching a state that we wouldn't like. That means that this is a warning, in this sense, a slightly different nature of the document than CHART 77, which described a state that was expected not to change completely quickly. We are now trying not to choose badly, as we did in 1946, and not to contribute in the elections to the fact that in the end we will be in the same phase as the CHARTists from 1977. And the moment of difference in the situation is really interesting, when before, during the previous regime, the whole state power, the state apparatus, was divided into some censorship, persecution, whereas today it is happening in a slightly different way. Most of the time it is happening indirectly. And it is true that some of the things you mention in the CHART about censorship, information, freedom of expression, some threats, short-term employment, it is true that I have already encountered this, both directly and indirectly. I even have one fresh case that I don't want to talk about yet, maybe we will publish it in the Epoch Times. But on the other hand, there are some moments that surprised me a bit, I don't know if it's not much anymore. For example, I will quote specifically, the freedom of public expression is suppressed by the central management of public education. Do you really think that public education is already under the control of someone? Well, definitely under the control of someone. There is someone called the Parliament, the Parliament appoints members of the Czech TV Council, the Czech Broadcasting Council. The Parliament, specifically the Embassy, also elects members of the Great Broadcasting Council, which is for broadcasting and television broadcasting. Well, of course, it is controlled by an organization such as the Czech Television or the Czech Broadcasting. Well, let's not lie to ourselves that they are not political prominents. Those people who sit in the Czech Television Council are elected with a mandate from politicians who are interested in the Czech Television functioning in some way. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Czech Television, when we look at it, and I think it was prepared by Mrs. Hanna Lipovská, that the Czech Television gives a much greater space to the opinions of those who praise the EU and, on the contrary, does not give so much space to the opinions of those who criticize the EU. So this role of those public and legal media is already there today. And we are very afraid that it will worsen because freedom of speech is basically one of the most important points in the map. We mention others there, there will probably be no room to name all of them here, a few of them are probably worth mentioning, but freedom of speech is today threatened to the greatest extent by the effort to centrally influence the media from Brussels. This effort is represented specifically by Víra Jourová, who is inventing one legislative party after another here, and through the first legislative party, through the DSA, she is trying to somehow direct social networks. So these social networks are, although they are private players on the market, but they get clear tasks, clear mantles on how to behave. And for me, at the moment, the difference between what is very public and what is a private institution is a bit blurred. Because at the moment when the private institution is under the cover of a fine, motivated to do something, and vice versa, for example, in the case of the MFA legislative party, which is a legislative party about so-called independent media, it is said there that the media that will behave so-called correctly will receive subsidies to be independent. And that means that if someone behaves badly, he will receive a fine, if he behaves correctly, he will receive subsidies. And thus, the private subject tends to behave exactly as the politician wants, as the euro commissioner Jourová wants, as they want in Brussels. And then it's about the fact that it's just an extension of the state power, which, although it appears outside as a private legal company, but basically controls the public power from the outside. So I think it's a bit like when there was, in 1977, there was the communist totalitarianism, which basically said everything is state, the media are state, that is, it is enough to control them through the state. So maybe then that Nazi-free ideology, that accountant with the fact that the private legal elements remain there, which are basically held in cuffs and have to behave as the leader wants, as the leadership wants, and in the end they became the extended arm and accomplices of everything that was happening here during the time when there was the Nazi totalitarianism. That is, although unnational media remain here, but they are influenced in such a way, not completely one hundred percent yet, that it is very dangerous. We would not like to get into that state, when we actually face it and it will deepen. Because what was prepared at the moment in the European Union, legislative DSA, legislative ENFA, it clearly aims to influence this media, to control and tell them how to do their job. And do you have any feedback from the signatories of the Charta 77? Well, I haven't mentioned it yet, but it's just a short time, three days since it was published, but I have very good feedback from many academics. In particular, we have been dealing with those who deal with the issue of clean deal, energetics, that is, with people of this type, technical focus, academics. And they basically challenged us to translate the Charta into at least English. And because it had a lot of publicity, because many people liked it, I have already found out that it works in English and Spanish. So even before the challenge from these academics came to us, we started working on the translation. With the fact that it can be said that the Charta is universal, you take out the passage that concerns the euro, which is an important issue for the Czech Republic, so basically all those articles refer to the European Convention, which concerns all the states of the European Union. And thus, both the translation into Spanish and into English will be able to be disseminated, among which it also concerns. So we will certainly publish the translations soon, as we are already working on them. I recently participated in a conference on public exchange research, or rather the market, organized by the CIMAR organization. And Agentura STEM presented the results of the research that it conducts on a three-month basis. And one of the questions for the respondents was, if there was a hypothetical vote for a referendum on coexistence in the European Union, then in the last year there were 55 to 60 percent of people for coexistence in the Union. And it was about a year ago when Agentura CVVM was also doing a similar survey and there were 66 percent for coexistence in the Union. It is true, however, that the share of those satisfied is not as high as the share of those who would like to stay in the Union or vote for it. The satisfaction of CVVM was 41 percent and the dissatisfaction was 36 percent. The number of indecisive people was 21 percent. And I think that Agentura STEM had a similar plus or minus from the latest survey, which was in March. So it looks like, from your point of view, it's starting to be pretty bad. So if it's about freedom, maybe the public is not yet in the point where you are. Well, I heard a rumor from an older colleague who said that if the Soviet Union would send us money to Czechoslovakia and stick stickers of the Soviet Union everywhere, it would be financed from the Soviet Union. Maybe we would still be friends with the Soviet Union today. That is, this psychological question about money and the Eurofund certainly plays a role when people think about the pros and cons of the European Union. It is essential for us that we know that there is not just one option how to make friends in the European Union, how to maintain the free market. We can also keep in touch with the membership of the European Free Trade Organization. So it's not a question for us whether to be or not in the European Union, but whether we could do better if we were in that collective. Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. These are currently four countries that are in the European Free Trade Organization. And we think that if people learned a little more about this organization, they would know that it keeps all the benefits that the European Union brings us. But it deprives us of those disadvantages. That is, the need to comply with all the guidelines, the need to finance the huge apparatus of 55,000 officials in Brussels, the need to share the subsidies that the free market offers us, which, of course, are not always just a gift, but often create obstacles for us into the future. So we create some kind of object here through the Eurofonds, but then we have to take care of it and we take care of it with our public money. In general, the British European Commissioner Peter Mendelsohn calculated that the membership in the European Union comes out of the Member States at 4% GDP. That is, for example, in the case of the Czech Republic for those 20 years, it was 3.7 billion crowns that we had to use for unproductive activities, securing all the bureaucracy related to the introduction of regulations or sharing subsidies. These are things that are not completely widespread among people. I have been working for a long time to spread these things among people. I already have 80 lectures on the topic of the freezing facts about the right of the European Union and I tell them these things. Well, in the end, I always mention that the European Union adopted the salami method, just the way it slowly cooks the frog. It's just that now came the moment when Grindel started here and that's a huge blow. So it cut off a big, very thick circle of that salami of the European Union. Well, we are trying to gradually reconstruct the circle that has already been cut off for us, so that we realize how big a piece of salami killed us, so that we can demonstrate that we really came up with a lot of things during our time as a member of the European Union, which, for example, are not quite highlighted, which are not so visible, but can burn us. And maybe I'll take one such typical detail from that map. We, as the Czech Republic, have long been built on the fact that everyone has equal rights. We established the right to vote for women here sometime in 1920, we were one of the first countries in the world and thanks to the fact that there was a regime here that we didn't like at all, women were far more emancipated, went to work earlier than maybe in some states in the west of us. That means that the equal rights of men and women in the Czech Republic are undoubtedly there. And now the European Union has come with the fact that we are to introduce quotas for women in the leadership of companies, which is clearly discrimination in our opinion. And that's just one thing. This thing doesn't have such a gigantic impact on the economic prosperity here. But it's about that way of thinking. It's about the fact that the European Union is also contributing to this, to the introduction of private companies. And that is absolutely unacceptable to us if we value the freedom of enterprise and the fact that all people should have equal rights and should not be discriminated against. So we are trying to investigate these things a little more. And as for the numbers themselves, each investigation is done a little differently. So the moment various agencies are compared, it is a question of what order the questions were posed, how exactly they were formulated. The fact is that Great Britain, at the time it decided in 2016 whether to enter or leave the European Union, so in fact most of the investigations also ensured that people would be against the exit. We already know the results today. The trusts have decided to leave the European Union. So I certainly respect that there are some numbers, but I think that until the referendum itself takes place here, we do not know the exact numbers. And the referendum should certainly take place under far more equal conditions than in 2003, when the government donated 200 million crowns to promote the interests of members of the European Union, covered the billboards all over the Czech Republic, where it was written yes, nicely in the shape of yellow stars, and did not even put a crown on it to explain the negative, that here, for example, a car petrol and oil ban was invented and we will have to pay for it. That is, here it was very unappreciated. Let's take inspiration from Great Britain in this direction, where the government divided both variants, leave and remain, the same amount of money from the state budget, and the referendum took place under fair conditions. So this is an inspiration for us, and we think that every generation should have the right to decide whether it wants or does not want to stay in some international organization that influences us in such a way as the European Union does. Today there are already 21 new people who can vote, that is, people who are almost 40 years old today did not yet have the right to vote in 2003, that is, they could not participate in the referendum. It would be fair for us, in such a remote time horizon, to either confirm the membership in the European Union, or to say, we have experience with it, it was enough for us. In the end, Great Britain held two referendums in 1975 and 2016. The difference was 40 years, but it can certainly be repeated in this way. You mentioned petitions a moment ago, I know you are working intensively on petitions for the Czech Republic. It is part of your campaign, it can be said, to the European Parliament. What do you say about the 5% limit, which is actually a condition for a party to get to the European Parliament, similar to ours in Czech parliamentary elections? After all, you are a smaller party, which is not yet on the border in the polls, but at least according to what I saw a month ago in the polls, I don't remember the agency, but you had 2.5% there. And contrary to that, I think I saw a survey last week to the Czech parliamentary elections by the Median agency, and there was really a large majority of parties below the 5% limit, even from the side of the current coalition. And basically, from the volume that was there, the first thing was that 65% of all those submitted would go to the elections, so that's already some data that says something. And then there is actually the second thing, that many of those parties end up under that spell, and in total it came out to me about 25% of all submitted votes. So it can be said that even more than a million votes will be lost in this way. What do you think about this system? Well, I have 120-page work on it, which I should defend my title with, so that I can finish this rigorous test. That is, I think about the 5% limit on my part, on the basis of the law, on the basis of the fact that our Constitution in Article 18 says that the elections to the embassy should basically take place on the basis of a fair representation, that is, it should basically be some kind of mirror of society. All opinions should be mirrored in the Senate. It is a different approach compared to how elections are held in the Senate, where they are usually elected. There is no need for so many minorities to be represented there again, because the Senate, let's say, slows it down, but the Senate is supposed to contain even those minority opinion currents. It's supposed to be a spectrum, it's supposed to be a mirror. And in recent years, politicians have tried to amend election laws in such a way that the mirror curves the composition of the embassy so that they can easily govern. But their task is to govern according to the opinions of the population. Not to deform the opinions so that they can easily govern. So I'm basically against having a 5% limit in the style we choose today. If we had an Australian election system, that is, a person can choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and make a list of their preferences, and if 1 does not get 5%, 2 will get 3, and so on, until a person, for example, votes for the fifth preferred party. But he is not afraid to mark someone as 1 because his vote will not be lost. That is, if 1 does not reach the 5% limit, his vote is 2, and so on, until we hit the party that has exceeded the 5% limit. But it's at least a compromise. It's a possibility that the psychological 5% limit will not become a barrier so that some new opinion currents, new parties can get to the polls. Because I see it in the streets. Of course, it's a big scare. But the fact is that in the Euro elections the voting mathematics is quite different. I have heard many times from people that we risk in the Euro elections, we give the vote to you, although something comes out in the polls, but we do not care. It is much more important that the votes do not fall in the parliamentary elections after which the government is created. But in the Euro Parliament, there is no government based on the results of the Czech elections. There is a huge government based on results of the European Union elections. And people will want to go to the European Parliament and vote with their hearts and calculate less and say that they will not get there, they will get there. We rely on it a bit, that people will vote with their hearts. Because we know that our polling potential is far over the 5% limit, but the preferences that are coming out today are again below the 5% limit. But it doesn't scare us. We have the experience from 10 years ago, when we had far worse numbers than we have today. And yet we overcame the 5% limit. Now it's about lighting up the hearts of those people, so that they really decide with their hearts that they will vote for us, and not calculate in the sense that, I sometimes hear from people, they will vote for Babiš against this government, so that Babiš will shoot them. You just have to realize what everything was done by the governments of André Babiš in those 8 years when he ruled here. And we could talk about school inclusion, about the time of COVID, we could talk about other topics. I think that the criticism was then in place by the current government. That means, I would definitely not like it if people, under the influence of that 5% limit, went and voted for André Babiš in the elections. It would be possible to understand it a little bit in the sense that they would be afraid of the lost vote in the elections. But those are still far away. And at that moment I think that they will not have to be afraid of the lost vote in the case of the free ones, because if we now cross the 5% limit, one or two MEPs will get there instead of us, and in the second place we have Matěj Gregor and he would be great too, then I think that people will no longer be afraid of the lost vote. So our task now is to get over 5% and at the same time, as a lawyer, a person who cares about us respecting our Constitution, I will do my best to bring the Australian election system with a 5% limit, or ideally to lower that 5% limit. Because the fact is that today the Caps will not release their fish. Today the big parties pretend to be big forever, but let's see how social democracy turned out. It invented the election laws, which at that time fit it perfectly, because it was the big party, while today the election laws are to its discontent. So as someone else digs a hole, he often falls into it himself, and I would like us not to have that hole in our election laws at all. Thank you for your view, but I would also like to return to the European Union. At the moment, the Migration Pact is being discussed quite actively, and the Council of Ministers is to decide on its decision on May 15, if I'm not mistaken, not May 14. What is your opinion on the current situation? Well, I hope that our minister or prime minister, the question is in what order the Czech delegation will go there, will stand against this Migration Pact, because we do not need any Migration Pact. We do not need to redistribute migrants. We do not need to spread the emerging problem among all member states. We should solve this problem. And again, as a free country, we offer a solution that is inspired by how Australia does its migration policy. Australia has a completely different approach than the European Union. While the European Union in 2015 reacted to the mass wave of migrants by Angela Merkel and other representatives saying something in the sense of ja schaffen das, we can do it, we will provide you all, come. Well, that was the instruction. Come to the European Union, you will live better, they will provide you with their money, with the money of tax payers. And this, of course, motivated both the migrants themselves, as well as the smugglers, businessmen with people who began to work to ensure that more and more illegals migrants arrive to Europe. If, conversely, we reacted in the sense of the reaction of Australia, which simply said, do not fly to Australia, it is priceless, we will catch you, somehow we will send you ashore, destroy your ship, deport these illegal migrants to the island of Papua New Guinea, Nauru or to some great island. In fact, at the moment when Australia said that, when it really started to work, So basically, the ships stopped sailing after a while, because they found out that it was priceless, that it would not pay off for them. So the shipwreckers stopped having customers, the mass migrants, the illegal migrants stopped paying some people to take them to Australia on a boat, because they knew that it made no sense at all to risk their lives on a boat to get to Australia. And if we went the same way, we agreed, just like Great Britain agreed with Rwanda, with some other country, to which we will deport these illegal migrants, then I think that it would have the same result in our country. Because today it is like this, that the shipwreckers bring a number of migrants here, they jump on the boat, turn around and go back. I have seen many such records, where the shipwreckers repeatedly bring a lot of illegal migrants on one boat, and then we redistribute them with some quotas. The shipwrecker lied, lied that there is no redistribution mechanism there. Of course there is, he says that there is somewhere like the last instance, that it will not be applied anyway. We know that redistribution does not work, because these migrants can eventually move around the European Union as they want, so it will not be used anyway, but I wonder why it is there, if it will not be used. Why did we write it there, if we don't want to use it? If it is not similar to what Zuzana Rojtová did, when she praised the Lisbon Treaty, then she shot such an educational clip, in which she said, and don't be afraid that the southern states will send us migrants. And we agreed by accepting the Lisbon Treaty on the loss of human rights in the field of migration and asylum policy. And after six years since the Lisbon Treaty was adopted, the first migration quotas were adopted, which, by the way, still apply to this day. No one has stopped them yet. We still have a duty, according to the quotas from 2015, to accept these migrants. And what Zuzana Rojtová told us, it was just the typical cooking of the toad, when the toad says, well, we don't want to cook you, we just turn it on a little bit, don't be afraid, don't be afraid. Well, I say, don't be afraid, because it's not a fear, it's a very rational fear, based on our negative experience. When our politicians bully us in this way and say that it won't hurt us if they do something, we pay great attention to it. I would like our government not to shame its people and really vote against it there. Not that it somehow holds up alibistically, because when voting in the European Union, holding up and voting against it has a slightly different meaning than, for example, in our parliament, when, in fact, holding up and being against it has exactly the same effect on the result. And basically it only has a different color on that light table. But in fact, it is necessary to strongly oppose it there and really give it to Viktor Orbán, because when the migration pact was first resolved sometime in June of this year and Viktor Orbán said it was wrong, that it should not be accepted, well, our politicians, Petr Fiala, Vítra Kušan, basically accused Viktor Orbán of being destructive, that he was not trying to do anything in favor of the agreement, but that he was right. And today it is necessary to apologize and say, Viktor Orbán was right already in June, it is disadvantageous for us, we will vote against. It's just that we don't have it completely in our hands, we lost the veto right in the field of migration and asylum policy, and so it can happen, just like with the approval of migration quotas in 2015, that the proposal will be approved, even if we are against it, but we should have the clean table, the opportunity to look ourselves in the mirror and the opportunity to say, we did our best so that the migration pact was not accepted, regardless of how others will vote on it. Unfortunately, in Poland there is again the government of Donald Tusk, just like in 2015, when the migration quotas were decided for the first time, then Poland betrayed V4, voted for migration quotas, I, of course, am afraid that the migration pact will be approved in a similar way now. Libor Vondráček, Chairman of the Freedom Party, says. Thank you for the interview. Thank you for the invitation.