Before the revolution I was at the bottom, said Lubomír Zaorálek, today he is running with the Communists
Lubomír Zaorálek is one of the greatest veterans of Czech post-November politics. This year he wants to attempt a major comeback to the benches in the guise of the Stačilo! movement led by communist Kateřina Konečná, where he directed candidates from Socdem together with the new party leader Jana Maláčová. Rank-and-file members loudly criticize their leadership, Zaorálek himself in an older interview for LP-Life.cz described how difficult life was for him during the times of the communist party dictatorship.
The entry of Socdem members onto the candidate lists, as the undeclared coalition of political parties according to the electoral law, is called, caused quite a stormy reaction within the party. In the opening photo, we see, for example, a protest by young social democrats against the party leadership.
A significant part of this resistance to associating with communists is directed at the first vice-chairman of Socdem, Lubomír Zaorálek. Members of the Ostrava party organization, of which he is a member, suddenly began to demand his organizational transfer to Prague. The reason is said to be his rare participation in meetings of the regional cell, which, however, did not bother his local party colleagues before signing the cooperation with the communists.
Zaorálek has a very rich political past. If his strategy of flying on Communist wings into the Chamber of Deputies worked out, he would earn a unique primacy. He would become an active Member of Parliament who got into the Chamber ahead of everyone else. After all, he was co-opted as an MP of the Civic Forum a week earlier than the biggest veteran of the Chamber, Marek Benda (ODS), as pointed out by the expert on post-November political development, Jindřich Šídlo.
However, the paradoxes surrounding Zaorálek's next political station would not end there. He would crawl into the parliamentary bench on the movement's candidate list, which is blatantly based on KSČM. It was his non-communist political engagement during the dictatorship of one party that originally brought him into the parliamentary bench.
"I didn't want to get into politics too much, but after 1989 it "swallowed" me. People in Ostrava knew me because I was giving those lectures, and when revolutionary events broke out, many people assumed that I would figure in it. So I found myself there without signing up,"
he told LP-Life.cz in an interview from 2020.
According to his words from that time, the aforementioned lectures also led to his professional and existential problems, which he experienced before the Velvet Revolution. His involvement in the organization of lecture activities led to the end of his work engagement in the position of dramaturg of Czechoslovak Television in 1986.
"I got into conflict with the management of the television and as a result, I had to leave the television in 1986. Very much in the wrong. It was also because I organized lectures in Ostrava, which they did not like "ideologically". And after this departure, I couldn't find a job anywhere. So I always say that the revolution came as my salvation, because before it I hardly had anywhere to lay my head,"
The former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Culture confided in the editorial office.
He also spoke about when he had to refuse creators from the television program for ideological reasons, he felt like a "criminal". Leaving television at that time was not a banality for him.
"When I was fired from television in 1986, I visited ten or fifteen places and no one wanted to hire me. My situation was precarious and it was the most depressing period I have ever experienced. When you have two children, a family and find out that nobody wants to hire you, it's incredibly frustrating. I was very low at that point, it was hell. And when November '89 came, a light suddenly turned on in front of me, "
Lubomir Zaoralek described his younger years during the communist regime, which is not only associated with the idyll of youth.
His career over the years in top politics has been quite varied and successful. In addition to the executive functions of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Culture, he was also the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies. In the 2017 elections, he was also the electoral leader of the ČSSD and a candidate for prime minister. However, with around 7.7% of the vote, he did not replace his colleague Bohuslav Sobotka in the highest government office.
