Pavel Bem. “Little big” mayor. The one who brought Prague into the new millennium
photo: Jakub Mračno, PrahaIN.cz/Oldtown Hall
GENTLEMEN AT THE HEAD OF THE METROPOLITAN We interrupted the memory of Prague’s mayors in the summer of 2002, when it seemed that a flood had taken away from the city all the hope and enthusiasm of the nineties. Two months later, municipal elections were held in this atmosphere. And although ODS was the main favorite even after the term of the German mayor, it was not expected that its new leader would be able to fundamentally transform the city in eight years and earn the nickname “little big mayor”.
Pavel Bém is a native of Prague, he studied medicine here in 1987 after Na Zatlance grammar school. After all, this is psychiatry. In 1989, he took part in anti-regime demonstrations, especially Palach’s week in January of that year was a terrifying experience for him.
In November 1989, great opportunities opened up for Bém, who was getting his psychiatry certificate in the spring of 1990. He completes a two-year course at John Hopkins University in Baltimore and becomes an expert on drug policy. He devoted himself to this first in Prague medical facilities, and since 1995 also as a member of expert teams at the Ministry of Health. Finally, he founded Interdepartmental Anti-Drug Commission at the Government Office, which coordinated the cooperation of individual departments in the fight against drugs. His position gradually evolved into the National Anti-Drug Coordinator. This position at the Government Office still works today.
Here, the current thirty-year-old got a taste of politics and at the same time became close to the then prime minister Václav Klaus, who would become his political patron.
In 1998, when the ODS leaves the government and the new prime minister brings his experts to the Government Office, Bém accepts the offer to run for Klaus’s party as mayor of Prague 6. At the turn of the millennium, he managed the sixth district quite successfully.
Before the next municipal elections, his ambitions met with sad situations in Prague’s ODS, which everyone associated with Mayor Němec and his crazy statement “the situation is extremely excellent”, while a thousand-year flood was rolling in the metropolis.
Bém, as the Prague-wide leader, acted as a way out of an emergency, and probably no one could have imagined what would happen during the next eight years.
The new mayor introduced himself above all with indestructible work performance, which he also demanded from all his subordinates.
“He ruled almost despotically, he was an authority, before which officials and colleagues from the council were knocking,” journalists recalled on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Back then he was ten less and at the peak of his powers.
His arrival coincided with a time when it was clear that things had to change in Prague. Unfinished infrastructure projects clogged the city center on a daily basis, the famous trams from pre-revolutionary times were slowly reaching their end of life. The construction of the metro was delayed, and in addition, practically the entire B line had been shut down after the floods. And in the fourth quarter by the river, after the high water, it basically started from scratch.
The new master of the town hall had no shortage of grandiose plans. In addition to the progress in the construction of the city ring road, traffic in the center was to be solved by the gigantic project of the Blanka tunnel. The new mayor really succeeded in all this. He was able to speed up the construction of the subway, modernize the public transport fleet and, through reasonable management, obtain funds for other projects.
Moreover, after the entry of the Czech Republic into the EU, the possibilities of drawing on EU funds opened up, which, despite some problematic projects, actually managed to bring a number of interesting investments to Czech cities, including Prague. The metropolis actually repaired itself in the first years after the floods.
But the mayor’s biggest dream, which was supposed to kickstart the development of Prague, was the summer Olympics.
Bém was a passionate sportsman, he was able to climb the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, as mayor, later as a member of parliament the second highest peak, K2 (as only the third Czech), and then two more eight-thousanders. This is a prestigious club of climbers who have climbed the highest body of all seven continents.
That is why he took the project as his own and, according to the journalists who actually participated in the Olympics with him at the time, he was passionately immersed in it. And even at a time when it was already obvious that this vision was too big a mouthful. The Olympics stuck a 70 million ax in the budget just on plans and projects, before the dreams towards the 2016 Games ended.
For context: At the turn of the millennium, the world thought that a two-week meeting of the world’s best athletes was a project that could really support the development of the city’s infrastructure. From the previous Olympics, there were positive experiences in this direction from Seoul, Barcelona or Sydney.
Only after Athens 2004, which destroyed the entire country’s economy with megalomaniac and thoughtless investments, doubts began to appear. And in the end, they were the important factor that put Mayor Bém’s biggest Prague plan on hold.
But when in 2006 the first election term ended under an extremely successful mayor. It seemed to people that he really had a vision of where the city should go next, and optimism returned to the metropolis after the floods. Two years after joining the EU, Prague was in the middle of a boom full of foreign tourists and everything seemed to be bathed in sunshine.
So the mayor managed to get a unique 55 percent of the votes in defense of his chain. Although it was said since the nineties that the tennis racket of Václav Klaus would also win in Prague under the ODS flag, this result surpassed everything that the “blue” had ever achieved in the capital. In addition, they got all the “numbered” district town halls.
For Pavel Bém, it was a peak. Václav Klaus introduced him to foreign delegations at the Castle as “our successful municipal politician”, in the ODS his successes in Prague earned him the position of first vice-chairman and he was proposed as one of the greatest talents of Czech politics.
The Godfathers and the Library
Two years later, he confronted Chairman Topolánek himself. He lost, and at that moment his political slide seemed to begin. Information emerged about his ties to businessman Roman Janoušek, which should have led to influencing public contracts. The media went all out on it.
The metropolis has always distributed the most public money from the whole republic, and in the times after joining the EU even more than ever before. And of course big money attracts different people. The writer Ondřej Neff recalled on one occasion that already between the wars it was said in the capital that “even the last ku*va is more honorable than the Prague builder”.
But the ODS dominated the city at that time in such a way that all similar troubles that appeared followed it.
Names like Janoušek, Rittig, Hrdlička or Palounek were a media-friendly symbol of the connection between business and politics, which was nicknamed “godfatherism” at the time. And because in the times of economic depression, in the words of Jiří Suchý, “it became the fashion of the season to properly tap into iniquity”, so ten years ago they used to be full of newspaper orders, books were written about it and songs were sung.
Even though the courts later were significantly more restrained in their assessment, at the time it created the impression that the Prague organization ODS was the embodiment of the worst corruption marasmus.
In 2009, there was an affair with an architectural competition for the new building of the National Library. Mayor Bém originally won the proposal of the architect Jan Kaplický president, but then changed his position when Václav Klaus reacted very negatively to it. Disputes about the regularity of the architectural competition and the subsequent death of the architect put the project on hold, and Bém later called it a mistake.
“I failed to complete the construction of the entire superior transport structure of Prague, I lost the election with Topolánek, I did not finish the Olympic project, I did not build the Kaplický library and I did not prevent my successors in Prague from destroying part of what I was able to describe in my last years as a municipality.
But the “Kaplický” case only highlighted the declining popularity of the mayor. In 2010, her ODS did not nominate a candidate for leadership. He became an MP for one term, and then left politics.
They called the associate professor
His successor Bohuslav Svoboda was, like Bém, a doctor, but otherwise the perfect opposite of his less mercurial predecessor. With his tall figure and sonorous baritone, the renowned Prague gynecologist and former chairman of the Czech Medical Chamber acted as the embodiment of seriousness.
Unfortunately, the period 2010-2014 was affected by a very similar election result for ODS, ČSSD and the newly formed TOP 09. Originally, the ODS and ČSSD formed a coalition (which caused protests directly in the assembly hall, which even President Václav Havel came to).
Later, associate professor Svoboda changed the coalition partner to TOP 09, so that the agreement between the other two parties ultimately failed the ODS, and Svoboda had to hand over the mayor’s chain to Tomáš Hudeček from TOP 09.
The young mayor had to deal with floods a few weeks after taking office, similar to Igor Němec in 2002. This time, however, the water was less and the metropolis was more prepared, so the floods of June 2013 were managed in Prague with practically no consequences.
But even that did not help the coalition parties. The 2014 municipal elections were marked by the dazzling nationwide rise of Andrej Babiš’s ANO movement, which also won in the capital and Adriana Krnáčová became mayor. The art historian and later anti-corruption activist also benefited from the peak media interest in Bém’s era commissions at the time.
During the four years of her mayorship, some long-term projects were completed, for example the opening of the Blanka tunnel after delays. Other Bém projects were modified, for example the megalomaniacal Pražana Opencard was replaced by the more modest “Lítačka”.
On the other hand, it was during the Krnáčs’ term as mayor that criticism began to be heard for the first time, that the development of the city had stopped and that the leadership of the metropolis had no vision. At the end of her tenure, the mayoress herself went down in history with an angry statement about “lousy Praguers” who are always complaining about something.
Another election was the answer to her actions. Five parties with very similar results got into the council.
In addition to the ODS and ANO, there were the Pirates, the stars of national politics since the previous year, when, under the extravagant chairman Ivan Bartoš, they broke into the lower house with a program combining the fight against corruption and “smart modern solutions”, which exactly hit the Prague mood of autumn 2018.
And there was also the PRAHA SOBĚ movement, which was founded by the mayor of Prague 7, Jan Čižinský, to support a marketing-savvy group of Leten and Holešovice hipsters. This targeted very similar constituencies.
The five closing candidates of the United Forces for Prague, where in Prague the traditionally successful TOP 09 teamed up with the STAN movement and smaller strategic projects under the slogan: “Professional city management. Finally!”
Despite the victory of the ODS, the Pirates, PRAHA SOBĚ and the United Forces agreed on a coalition. Under the leadership of Mayor Zdenek Hřib, the new coalition really offered a vision. A vision of a “green” city full of cyclists, neighborhood togetherness and community gardens. The slogan became “smart city” or “smart solutions”.
Even if the Bém era is still the most popular scarecrow for the current coalition and its sympathizers, many might be surprised to learn that their ambitions and plans are of a very similar rank to those in the time of Pavel Bém.
Because the metropolis of the twenty-first century is, in short, still dealing with the same problems.
And while a few years ago, the nickname “Mazánek” was most often heard in connection with Bémy, which he was supposed to frequent in the wiretapping of businessman Janoušek, recently it has been heard more and more often that he was the “little big mayor”.