12 November 2006

Czech & Slovak Right Wingers Weekend

Well we made it back to Prague, today. The dashing Peter Martinovic (pictured) made us feel very welcome at the Czech and Slovak Right Wingers Weekend despite all the other organisational duties he took on. After all his hard working organising and moderating the conference he'll probably be in a recovery phase for a few days. Peter introduced me to Robert Kotzian (pictured) who is a mayor in Brno, the Czech Republic's second city and is an authority on Czech Young Conservatives having been an active one since 1998 (more on that in a future post).

The conference side of things contained a few surprises. The first thing I should mention is that despite the name of the conference, there was a large mix of delegates from a variety of parties and publications. Both centrists and right-wingers from the Slovakian Christians Democrat Party (KDH) were on the main stage as were politicians from the SDKU from Slovakia and ODS from the Czech Republic. Another interesting thing was that the main panel in one debate included magazine directors, writers and publishers.

Another thing Westerners might find surprising was to meet groups of young right-wingers with no specific party affilliation. For example, I enjoyed
spending time with Robert (an ambitious student), Richard (an IT systems consultant) and Petra (who had just started her own advertising agency) all from Bratislava. They were clearly economic liberals and generally right-wing, but did not give themselves a party label. There was a similar group from Prague.

By the time we arrived in Modra last night the night had drawn in, but today we managed to catch a Slovak Autumn on its last legs - which was wonderful. We took a few pictures, but here's one of woodland and above is a rainbow further on in our drive home.

6 comments:

CityUnslicker said...

Sounds like you had a nice weekend. Like hte pictures too. You have some talent there.

Anonymous said...

Hello cityunslicker. Just to say it was me who took those photos, so, thank you! :-) I am not into politics as much as PT, but I must say I really enjoyed it! I will go next time for sure.

Anonymous said...

Interesting insight to political life over there PT. A good read.

Anonymous said...

A right-wingers gathering? I don't suppose there is such a thing in the UK, is there? Would you recommend something like that in Britain?

Lovely pictures of the Czech Republic. It sure looks like a beautiful country in Autumn.

Anonymous said...

PT: I have already expressed my thanks to you and your girlfriend for coming to Modra, but I think I need to reiterate it even here on your blog.

It was great to meet you and talk to you! Having a real and alive :) member of the Tory Party amongst us at our Right-wing Conference was something I have described as 'exclusive' and I reckon my friends would definitely agree with me. You made an impression and added a star to our conference's prestige rank :) I wish you well and hope we'll see each other very soon in Prague.

Anonymous said...

I must admit Peter looks very dashing, yes, I can confirm after meeting you, that you are very "real and alive".

Glad you had sucha gret time, the countryside looks stunning.