Expert: Negative billboards “do right thing from ANO's perspectiveâ€
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Loading... - Filip Novotny
- 05 May 2022
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“Things were better under Babiš!” declare billboards that have been popping up around the Czech Republic. ANO’s name does not appear on the ads – depicting people complaining about how they’ve lost out under the Fiala government – and the party denies it even is a campaign. How much impact can these billboards have? I put that question to political scientist Otto Eibl of Masaryk University.
“From my point of view the campaign does the right thing, from ANO’s perspective.
“Because they didn’t have enough attention from the media, which only makes sense because they lost in the elections, or weren’t able to form a government.
“Now media attention is very limited, and the media are focused on Prime Minister Fiala.
“So the Babiš team needed something and they came up with this, and I think it will work for many, many reasons.
“It will be effective, I believe.
“And it is effective. The proof of the effectiveness of the campaign is this interview.”
The ANO party are claiming that this is not a political campaign. What do you say to that assertion?
Otto Eibl | Photo: Masaryk University Brno Otto Eibl|Photo: Masaryk University Brno
“No, it’s a political campaign, of course. It’s part of their permanent campaign.
“Putting non-politicians on billboards doesn’t make any change.
“It has political goals and it is happening in politics, so it is a political campaign.
“But it pretends not to be.”
What do you think it says about the possible tone we could expect in electioneering later this year? It looks like they are going for the fact that government are helping Ukrainians and “taking away from our people”.
“It depends if we talk about local, Senate or presidential elections.
“I think we will see a mixture of, let’s say, xenophobia, of populism – so everything that we are used to, what we have already seen and what we have already known.
“So the tone will be rather aggressive.
“Babiš has to fight, Babiš has to make the impression that he is the one who cares about ‘our people’, about Czech people.
“When the Ukrainians started coming, he also started repeating that the government was not thinking about our people.
“This works for certain people.
“So this is a prequel of something, something bigger – they are maybe testing something. Read More...
