Ústí is not Prague and Lobendava is not Ústí. What worries the border residents who vote for Andrej Babiš en masse — HlídacíPes.org
The winner of the first round of the presidential election, Petr Pavel, went to Ústí nad Labem on Tuesday and is going to Ostrava. These are the regions where he had the weakest results and where, on the contrary, his competitor Andrej Babiš was the most successful. Judging by the reaction, the visit to Ústí nad Labem became a kind of manifestation of the invalidity of the claim that Ústí is not Prague, or the dangerously scornful slogan “Prague and love must win over the countryside and hatred”.
The key to understanding the results of the first round, but ultimately also the series of previous elections, does not lie in the Ústí Region in the big cities, but in areas with a lot of socio-pathological phenomena outside the larger agglomeration. This year, the strip where Andrej Babiš won overwhelmingly stretches along the former North Bohemian coal basin, rather in the foothills of Lounsk or Mostek. And also in Šluknovské vyběžek, formally falling under the district town of Děčín, but effectively cut off from the outside world.
In the Ústí Region as a whole, Babiš won with a result of 47.27%, Pavel won 29.28%. In Ústí nad Labem itself, the ratio was 43.29% / 33.34%.
There are roughly two dozen electoral districts in Šluknovské Víběžek and around 55,000 voters live here. So not much to make the area interesting for the candidate, which is repeated in every election. Babiš’s results were as follows: Lobendava 62.41%, Staré Křečany II 60.4%, Jiříkov I 59.43%, Jiříkov II 56.87%, Mikulášovice III 54.76%, Vilémov 54.42%, Velký Šenov 54 .34%, Šlukov III 53.62%.
From Černouček near Roudnice nad Labem, where Petr Pavel lives, it was 55 kilometers to the meeting in Ústí nad Labem on Tuesday, and the journey can be completed in 40 minutes. If he wanted to go further from Ústí to Lobendava, for example, the distance is almost twice as long and the journey would take over an hour and a half.
It would be as long a journey as the people from the promontory would have to travel if they travel to the regional capital, for example, for basic health care. This is because it fails in the areas around Rumburk or Šluknov.
As Adam Vojtěch boasted
We can still find it on the website of the Ministry of Health press release from August 2019, in which then-minister Adam Vojtěch brags about signing a memorandum on ensuring cross-border care, which he signed with his Saxon colleague Barbara Klepsch.
“It is our priority to improve the availability of health care in areas where it is currently insufficiently provided and people have to commute for it. Thanks to the document signed today, patients from the Šluknovský promontory will now be able to seek medical care within the framework of public health insurance at the hospital in Rumburk and Varnsdorf, as well as at the clinic in the border town of Sebnitz,” promised the Ministry of Health for the ANO movement three and a half years ago.
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The situation at that time was more like something from a dark humor book. In the vicinity of Dolní Poustevna, if you have an accident or a heart attack, it pays to run or be taken to the border bridge and call the German ambulance. The hospital is two kilometers away. The aforementioned memorandum, signed at a time when the local Lužická hospital in Rumburk was teetering on insolvency and threatened with complete cancellation, was supposed to solve and legalize it. At that time, absurd scenes took place here, when patients at the gas station in Chřibský were transferred from ambulance to ambulance, because they were not allowed to leave the spur here, so that they would not be out of reach for a long time. And in the second ambulance, the patient “whistled” for tens of minutes to the hospital in Děčín or Ústí nad Labem.
Petr Stoklásek from Velké Šenov described the problems with the availability of care for HlídacíPes.org. “The doctor is sending me for a specialized examination, but that’s all for three Sundays, four weeks, now I was in Česká Lípa, I waited a month for a test in Rumburk, I’m waiting two months for an esophageal tube,” said the man, who, according to his words, lost all confidence in politics.
According to the result of this year’s election, he is not alone in the outlier, because in the three and a half years since the signing of the memorandum, this is exactly what has changed: nothing at all.
Minister: It was voter fraud
The ongoing deplorable state of availability and quality of health care in Šluknov region was recently once again pointed out by local senator Zbyněk Linhart. In a letter to the Minister of Health, Vlastimil Válk, he describes the chronic shortage of doctors, dentists and psychiatrists, the commuting of patients outside the region, unavailable prevention, the dragging out of the reconstruction of the hospital in Rumburk, the overloading or overloading of nearby hospitals that cannot handle patients.
He also mentioned the still non-functioning cross-border care, which, despite the promises of ex-minister Vojtěch, never started, mainly due to the resistance of health insurance companies. “It was just political hype, nothing actually happened,” Senator Linhart says today, noting that one thing is pressure from the department, if there ever really was one, and another is the insurance companies. “The German side would be interested in it, they have roughly a third of their capacity unused, but the problem is with the prices. The solution is not even pretending to be,” adds Linhart.
He has already received a reply from Minister of War Válk to the aforementioned letter. He did not take napkins during the Senate plenary session last week. “In my opinion, the citizens of the region were completely incorrectly misled, unfortunately also by my predecessor, that it is possible to sign a contract with neighboring countries and, based on that contract, the insurance company will reimburse services in the neighboring country,” said Válek, saying that the memorandum with she never signed such a contract. “I realize I’m saying this on the microphone, that’s why I’m saying it, from the beginning of those scams, those who participated in that scam were on the citizens. It was purely just some manipulation and pre-election campaign that had absolutely no effect. Those of you who sit on the administrative or supervisory boards of insurance companies know that nothing like this is technically possible,” added the Minister of Health.
At the same time, the situation in the healthcare sector is only one of the areas that are failing in the Šluknovské outcrop. We can continue to talk about quality education, about why mainly younger and more educated people are leaving. Or about transport, which turns ordinary official matters into a day trip.
Petr Pavel said on Tuesday at Kostelní náměstí that he is at home in the Ústí Region. However, elections in remote areas are decided here by people who, for various reasons, cannot feel at home here.
The “Too Distant Czechia” project is being created with the support of the Independent Journalism Endowment Fund.
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