Elections between two narratives on war and peace.
Recent Czech presidential elections teach us the most advanced methods of the political warfare. Also, we witnessed how even the most professional campaign could fail on the contact with reality.
What: Presidential elections
Where: Czech Republic
When: January 28, 2023
Two candidates at the top:
Retired general Petr Pavel, former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee and Czech Donald Trump – populist billionaire Andrej Babis.
Picture: Three candidates with the most votes: Petr Pavel (president elect), Danuse Nerudova (finished 3rd), Andrej Babis (2nd).
The concept of election campaigns as dirty warfare over a human emotional short-circuit is becoming more painful and brazen with each election cycle. Ever since 2016, when Cambridge Analytica showed the stupefied world how an election can be won even for a completely incompetent outsider, if based on access to psychological data, we have known that elections are decided by knowledge of Big Data, the ability to quickly navigate the analysis and the ability to win the battle for supremacy in the information space. This battle has no rules except one – the winner takes all. Regardless of his message or program.
It is actually a “ real hack" of the neuroplastic quality of the human brain and competes for the total KPI´s in the entire information space. The number of repetitions creates the impression of the familiar, the known, and therefore the less dangerous. The more rigid and wary of novelties is the society, the more this tactic of simple repetition becomes important. The number of repetitions, as scientifically proven by the American psychologist Robert Zajonc, increases the acceptability of literally anything.
Recently in Czech Republic presidential elections, we could see quite bold competition for both main rivals of the election. Those candidates whose staffs did not have enough capacity for this competition fell out of the game. But repetition and share of the information space is not the only active substance of the victory. The second active ingredient is not content, as we might mistakenly believe, but memetic symbols that represent an explosive mixture of emotional nudges to act. And in those symbols and psychological nudges took place the center of gravity of an otherwise balanced duel.
Now, let's please ignore the fact of disastrous populist politics represented by Andrej Babis and his “privately owned movement” for the Czech Republic, because for undecided voters or even voters of Andrej Babis themselves, this quality fact did not play the slightest role in decision-making. Only a small part of the Czech population on Gaussian curve can derive its thinking from rational reasoning based on experience and quality evaluation. I estimate one percent of the population. The rest are people who need to get nudged to develop an emotional short circuit.
From the beginning, Pavel's campaign tried to create an emotional love brand for older women (who have the voting discipline of a well synchronized army) and a model alter ego for men (first Czech president Masaryk, a founding father, resembling physically Petr Pavel). Everything else was just a cosmetic supplement to the otherwise very clever brand management.
In terms of using rational arguments, the three other candidates were the most active, but they eventually fell out in an unequal contest. Danuse Nerudová (social injustice, global warming, young generation), Pavel Fischer (his incommensurable experience in politics and diplomacy), Marek Hilšer (young candidate with rational arguments about the need to change the political system and culture). However, these three candidates did not catch up with Babis and Pavel in any of the important qualities – in the number of shares (money, contacts, media, network) and in the psychological game of three emotions traditionally used to motivate voters: love butterflies in your stomach, fear and disgust. This triad simply wins elections. A voter who feels a state similar to a teenage crush on his candidate will forgive him absolutely anything, and will forgive his competitor absolutely nothing. That's why for years at Andrej Babis's election meetings we saw women 50+ angry at journalists who might want to ask the rich gentleman about some scoundrels in his past. If this feeling of falling in love is not evoked enough, people will not create the great wave, the dazed army that will trample anyone who opposes it. No crew in the world can afford so many paid associates, so it is all about the art of igniting butterfly feelings for the leader. And aggression towards anyone who gets in his way. There have been quite a few good studies on the psychology of disgust lately, and I've already written about them.
In this classic playbook of election campaigns, however, there was an unexpected turning point in the second round, when a fatal strategic mistake by Andrej Babis unexpectedly involved one real topic associated with real political decision consequences. And that was nothing less than the security of the country and its political orientation. Babis managed all this in a short-circuit babble about peace, where he exaggerated Orbán's electoral recipe of the "peace movement" and appeasement towards Russia ad absurdum and declared that he would not come to help NATO allies in the event of an attack. Suddenly, he stumbled upon Czech reality in such a brutal way that the artificial narrative of "I just want peace to spare our kids" that worked so well for Orbán fell apart.
The Czechs, fed up with the story of the 1938 British-French betrayal, when no one helped them against Hitler attacking their borderline territory, despite all of these signed contracts, and accustomed to the feeling of smallness and loneliness, suddenly gasped. Their previously successful populist leader suddenly openly spilled a simple truth: I will not help allies, allies will not help us. To say such a thing at a time when a horrible war is raging hundreds of miles away and a former NATO leader is running against you, you must be a complete idiot. Which praise the Lord, Andrej Babis really is.
Babis's talkative mouth could not have made a worse mistake than calling a sudden referendum on the security concept of the Czech Republic. The election campaign, conducted in a classic style such as a contest for the election of male miss and the number of sympathetic perceptions in the amygdala suddenly degenerated into a deadly serious, realistic duel for the concept of Czech security. Towards this conflict the messaging and the strategy of Petr Pavel's staff were actually directed all the time, but without success. They failed to enforce the word "safety" at all, and instead had to echo and correct the narrative of “NATO warmongering” over and over again. The offensive strategy necessary to seize the initiative or divert and rephrase memes from "war" to "safety" has long seemed unrealistic. Babis's mistake came as a gift from heaven and Pavel's staff masterfully used it within few hours. The " NATO warmonger versus incompetent populist" duel (the two narratives competing against each other) suddenly became a Russia-West duel, just like the Cold War era. And if the memory of my childhood does not deceive me, in Russia they never made good cars, wash machines and rock music.
Dear Alex, I think there is one more thing why Czechs support Ukraine:
Ukrainians are our neighbors, coworkers, humble, hard-working. They visit our churches, they try to live within Czech society peacefully.
Russians? Proud and unsatisfiable tourist. At best.
Question was: will we support Ukraine, Poland, or will we wait until Russians and Kadyrovites come for us.