Tens of thousands of demonstrators will gather on Letná plain tomorrow for a rally organised by protest group A Million Moments for Democracy.
As I wrote for Deutsche Welle, they’re worried about democratic backsliding under Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.
They fear his right-wing populist coalition wants to turn Czech TV and Czech Radio into political mouthpieces.
They’re worried at cuts in defence spending at a time of the heightened threat from Russia.
They say a host of dismissals of civil servants hides an ideologically-motivated purge of the Czech public sector.
And most recently they’ve been alarmed at proposals to introduce a so-called ‘foreign agents’ law to crack down on what Mr Babiš describes as ‘political NGOs’.
Opponents call it a ‘Russian law’, straight out of the Kremlin playbook.
Czech NGOs like People in Need are sounding the alarm.
Co-founder and Executive Director Šimon Pánek told me the draft released to the media would be more draconian even than legislation introduced (and eventually scrapped) by the illiberal governments of Slovakia and Hungary.
The law would levy fines of millions of crowns for those NGOs who fail to register as receiving foreign funds or collaborating with foreign entities.
Critics say the definition is so broad that it would theoretically affect everyone from the Association of Czech Beekeepers to anyone who posts on Facebook.
The government has hit back.
It says the draft was merely a starting point for discussion, not a ready-made bill.
Government ministers and MPs reject the ‘Russian’ label. They say that’s the opposition’s criticism of everything they don’t like. All they want is transparency, they say.
Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? is the response from the opposition and NGOs.
For them, the bill belongs to a wider confrontation over who controls the democratic space in the Czech Republic.
