The Czech Illiberal Paradox
From the outside, the Czech Republic looks like a success story. It is in the European Union and NATO, it is mostly secular, it scores well in global “safety” rankings, and nobody is marching tanks through Prague. People in Prague can drink craft coffee, go to techno clubs and fly to Barcelona for the weekend. If you only pass through, it feels like a normal, slightly quirky Central European democracy that more or less works.
Many Czechs see themselves as liberal in a cultural sense. They are proud of being atheists or agnostics. They roll their eyes at the Church. They like to say they are more tolerant than their neighbours. They tell themselves: we overthrew communism, we joined the EU, we are free. On paper, this sounds like liberal democracy.
But once you actually live inside the system — especially in a small town, dealing with local authorities, police, water, land and everyday conflicts — a very different picture appears. You start to realise that Czech liberalism is mostly cultural, not institutional. People may be secular in their private lives, but the institutions that are supposed to protect the individual and the public interest are weak, hollow, or quietly captured by informal networks.
This is what I mean by the Czech illiberal paradox: a country that feels liberal because it is atheist and relaxed in lifestyle, but functions in increasingly illiberal ways because informal power has more weight than laws, oversight or public interest.
I. Western Eyes, Eastern Structures
For Western Europeans or Americans, capitalism is not an ideology. It is the air they breathe. They are used to institutions that mostly work: courts that are boring and predictable, regulators that occasionally fine companies, police that — while far from perfect — are at least constrained by some expectations and public scrutiny. Even when they criticise “the system”, the system itself is fairly solid underneath.
When these people visit the Czech Republic, or come here as volunteers, they bring that assumption with them. They see supermarkets, cars, Airbnbs, card payments, start-ups, a parliament, elections, NGOs and a relatively clean capital city. They hear that Czechs are atheists, that the country is “liberal”, and they conclude that this must be a slightly cheaper, maybe less efficient, but basically familiar version of Western capitalism.
That assumption is wrong.
It is wrong not because the Czech Republic is some obvious dictatorship, but because the foundations are different. Western capitalism grew on top of centuries of evolving legal and institutional systems. Post-communist capitalism grew on top of a smashed state, a traumatised society and a dense undergrowth of informal survival networks that never really went away.
In that kind of environment, less state doesn’t mean more freedom. It just means more space for informal power.
II. From “Stealing From the State” to “Stealing From the Public Interest”
Under late communism, everyone understood an unwritten rule:
“If you didn’t steal from the state, you were stealing from your family.”
The state was seen as distant and absurd. People took tools from the factory, materials from the warehouse, food from the cooperative, and everyone pretended not to see, because the official system didn’t provide enough for a decent life. Informal networks — friends, cousins, comrades, neighbours — helped each other navigate shortages and absurd regulations. Surviving meant bending rules.
After 1989, the flag changed, the economy changed, the rhetoric changed. But those informal habits didn’t simply evaporate. The networks that knew how to work around the communist state learned how to work around the new state as well. A different kind of unwritten rule began to take shape:
“If you don’t take advantage of the public interest, you’re a fool — someone else will.”
That doesn’t mean everyone is a thief. It means that the public interest feels abstract, distant, and weak compared to personal survival and the survival of “our people”. If the state builds a road, the question quietly becomes: who gets the contracts, who gets the land re-zoned, who gets their property connected to water first, who gets a blind eye when they dump waste?
The old communist logic of “stealing from the state to feed the family” has mutated into a capitalist logic of “organised extraction from the public interest.” Instead of one big party-state, there are now dozens of smaller, overlapping networks of influence. Some are political, some business-based, some family-based, some local, some national. They compete and cooperate, but they share one basic assumption: public resources are there to be managed, traded and used, not protected as a neutral common good.
III. Atheism, Identity and the Illusion of Liberalism
This is why the Czech self-image is so confusing from the outside. When Czechs say they are “liberal”, they usually mean something cultural:
- We are not religious.
- We don’t let priests tell us what to do.
- We drink beer, we make jokes, we are relaxed.
- We are not like our more conservative neighbours.
On that level, they are right: Czech society is one of the most secular in Europe. But secularism on its own is not liberalism. Atheism doesn’t automatically come with strong courts, transparent administration or a functioning rule of law. It just means that one particular source of authority — the Church — doesn’t dominate public life.
The problem is that this cultural liberalism has been mistaken for institutional liberalism. Because people feel “free” in their private lives — free to drink, to joke, to travel, to ignore the Church — they assume that the system they live in must also be free in a deeper, democratic sense.
It isn’t.
Real liberal democracy is not about what you believe privately. It’s about what happens when you, as an individual, try to assert your rights against someone more powerful. It’s about what happens when you challenge corruption, or raise an environmental concern, or report a neighbour who is politically connected. It’s about whether institutions shield you from retaliation — or quietly side with the network.
Atheism can co-exist perfectly well with post-communist illiberalism. You can have a country that is culturally relaxed, ironic, secular — and structurally hostile to anyone who doesn’t fit into the informal power web.
IV. How Informal Power Works (Seen from Ground Level)
None of this is obvious if you only pass through Prague as a tourist. It becomes clear when you spend years in a small town, dealing with the local municipality, local police, local businesses and local neighbours. That’s where the democracy on paper collides with the informal reality.
Imagine a town where the same mayor has been in office for twenty years. Everyone knows him. The police know him. Business owners know him. People joke about him at the pub, but they also know that if you want anything done — a permit, a connection, a favour — eventually, it goes through him or his close circle.
On paper, there are procedures. In practice, information flows informally:
- You send a complaint to a certain department, and somehow the mayor — who wasn’t copied — gets the email and replies to everyone, framing you as the problem.
- You report that a neighbour is cutting down a tree without permission, and the response you get is not about the law, but about how the neighbour “has been here longer”.
- You tell the mayor that a neighbour is verbally abusing you, and there is no official answer, but the message clearly circulates inside the municipality.
At the same time, someone repeatedly comes onto your property, removes your surveillance equipment, and harasses you. You call the police, and nothing happens. If you, as a foreigner, did the same to someone else, you have the clear sense it would be treated as a municipal offence at minimum.
This is selective enforcement. The laws are there, but the decision to apply them depends on who you are and how you fit into the network.
When you escalate to higher authorities, you discover another layer: many of those people have known the mayor for years as well. Not always in a conspiratorial way — more in a quiet, routine way. They trust his version of reality because he has been there forever and you are just one individual complaining.
On paper, you are protected by democracy. In practice, you are outnumbered by relationships.
V. When Public Interest Becomes a Private Calculation
Nowhere is this clearer than in land, water and infrastructure decisions. Take a fictional but very plausible example, constructed from real patterns:
A car wash is built on what used to be wetlands, near a small factory employing around forty people. There is no proper sewage infrastructure. Wastewater goes straight into the ground. You raise this with the police, and they reply that the mayor has “made a deal” with the factory owner.
A deal. Not a public plan. Not a transparent permit. A deal.
Meanwhile, the mayor has quietly bought land in the same area that is scheduled to be connected to the new water line. Water pipes appear before any sewage plan is resolved. Other properties, with older septic systems or inconvenient locations, are left out or delayed. The message is simple:
If you are in the right network, the public infrastructure bends towards you. If you are not, it doesn’t.
This is what I mean by “stealing from the public interest”. Nobody has to literally pocket state cash. All they have to do is:
- place infrastructure where it benefits their circle first,
- ignore environmental risks when it is convenient,
- slow-walk enforcement for some and fast-track it for others,
- trade silence and loyalty for small advantages.
To outsiders, everything still looks like normal capitalism: there is a car wash, there is a factory, there are pipes, there are houses. But the invisible logic underneath is not “how do we best serve the public interest?” It is “how do we serve our people without getting into obvious legal trouble?”
VI. Media, Oligarchs and the Controlled Narrative
The national media picture mirrors this structure. On the surface, the Czech Republic has multiple outlets, TV channels, newspapers and websites. People can criticise the government. There is no single Ministry of Information.
But a small number of oligarchs and financial groups control a large share of mainstream media. Former prime ministers own major outlets. Powerful investment groups sit behind others. And in a small country, media, business and politics swirl in the same social pool.
That doesn’t mean every journalist is captured. It means the overall agenda is limited by ownership structures, advertising pressures and subtle relationships. You can criticise certain things loudly, but other topics remain strangely under-examined.
This is how the Czech Republic manages to project so many faces to the outside world:
- the safe tourist destination,
- the pragmatic EU member,
- the post-communist success story,
- the secular liberal society.
All of those faces are partly true. But none of them show the hollowing out of the public interest from below. None of them show how easily both left and right are absorbed by the same informal system, as long as they don’t seriously try to strengthen institutions at the expense of networks.
VII. Why Left vs Right Completely Misses the Point
Western political commentary loves the left–right axis. It’s an easy shorthand: is this government conservative or progressive, nationalist or globalist, social or market-driven?
In the Czech Republic, that axis is almost useless.
You can have a centre-right government that speaks the language of responsibility, fiscal discipline and Western alignment — while quietly presiding over the same informal decision-making, the same selective enforcement, the same compromises with local power brokers.
You can have a populist prime minister who built his career as a kind of “centre-left billionaire” defending the “ordinary people” — while owning major media outlets and benefiting from EU subsidies in ways that blur every line between public and private interest.
You can have communists making tactical alliances with the far right. You can have self-described liberals who are perfectly comfortable with oligarchic media ownership as long as it supports their side.
The real dividing line is not left vs right. It is informal networks vs institutional rule of law.
On the network side, you find people from all parties: former communists, nationalists, self-identified liberals, technocrats. On the institutional side, you find a much smaller group: judges who actually try to apply the law, civil servants who insist on procedure, whistleblowers, citizens who keep pushing for transparency even when they are treated as troublemakers.
The tragedy is that the institutional side is structurally weaker. It doesn’t have the same power of patronage, the same access to information, the same ability to reward loyalty or punish dissent.
VIII. Western Volunteers and the Myth of Universal Capitalism
Hosting volunteers from Western Europe and America has made this gap very clear to me. They arrive with good intentions. They see capitalism as something natural: markets, contracts, private property, and a state that more or less keeps the game fair in the background.
When we talk about politics, many of them instinctively associate “individual freedom” with right-leaning or libertarian ideas: lower taxes, less state, fewer regulations. They have learned, in their own context, that the state can become bloated, intrusive or moralistic.
But in a post-communist context where institutions were never strong to begin with, “less state” doesn’t mean “more space for the individual”. It means “more space for the networks that already control large chunks of public life”.
They also look at Czech atheism and see it as proof of openness: if people are not religious, they must be free-thinking. What they don’t see is that this cultural freedom co-exists with, and can even mask, a deeper structural unfreedom: the freedom of networks to act without consistent oversight.
When far-right parties here talk about “freedom”, they are often talking about the freedom of insiders:
- freedom for our business to ignore inconvenient regulations,
- freedom to dump external costs onto the environment,
- freedom to use police attention selectively,
- freedom to control local media narratives,
- freedom to treat the public interest as a negotiable asset.
That is not the same as the individual freedom imagined by Western liberals or libertarians. But because both camps use the same word — “freedom” — it is very easy to talk past each other.
IX. This Is Not About Despair — It Is About Clarity
It would be easy to read all of this as a black-pill diagnosis: everything is corrupt, nothing matters, the networks always win. That is not what I am saying.
What I am saying is that you cannot fix what you refuse to see. As long as the Czech Republic sells itself — and sells its own self-image — as a tidy, liberal, post-communist democracy where everything basically works, it will be almost impossible to strengthen the institutions that actually matter.
As long as Western observers treat every problem here as a “populist vs liberal” drama on a familiar left–right stage, they will misunderstand the deeper issue: the hollowing out of the public interest by informal power structures that do not care what colour the government’s logo is this year.
The first step is to name the system for what it is: post-communist illiberalism. A hybrid model where:
- elections happen and matter, but do not reliably control how power is exercised between cycles;
- cultural liberalism (atheism, relaxed social norms) co-exists with structural illiberalism (weak courts, selective enforcement, captured media);
- left and right both operate within the same web of informal deals, unless they deliberately choose to confront it — which is rare and costly;
- “stealing from the public interest” has become normalised as cleverness, not scandal.
X. Why Democracy Matters More Here Than It Appears
In a strange way, democracy matters more in the Czech Republic than in countries where institutions are already strong. In those places, you can survive a few bad governments without losing the core of the system. Here, the core is not yet fully formed.
Democracy is not just about voting. It is the long, slow, boring work of building institutions that are stronger than informal friendships, stronger than one mayor’s personal style, stronger than one oligarch’s media portfolio. It is the work of making sure that “public interest” means something concrete and enforceable, not just a phrase in speeches.
If that doesn’t happen, the hybrid model will keep drifting: formal democracy on top, informal illiberalism underneath. Both far-right and far-left forces will continue to plug themselves into the same structures whenever it suits them. Western observers will keep misreading the country through their own lens. And ordinary people will keep learning the same lesson:
Be clever. Protect yourself. Find a network. Don’t expect the state to protect the public interest — and certainly don’t expect it to protect you if you challenge the wrong person.
That is not a healthy lesson for any society.
A truly liberal Czech Republic — one that lives up to its own self-image — would require a different lesson:
- that laws apply regardless of who you know,
- that public resources are not bargaining chips,
- that media pluralism is more than cosmetic,
- that individual complaints are treated as signals, not nuisances,
- that the state is not an enemy to be looted but a framework to be improved.
Getting there will not come from the left alone or the right alone. It will come from people — inside and outside the country — deciding to look past the comfortable narratives and see the structure underneath.
Only then can the Czech Republic stop being an illiberal paradox and become what it already likes to believe it is: a genuinely liberal democracy, not just an atheist one.
Links mentioned (optional further reading):
These are suggested readings for readers who want a deeper dive into post-communist governance, informal networks and media ownership in Central Europe. Replace, add or remove links as you see fit for your blog.
