Interior Ministry: SPD Promotes Extremist Agenda

Tomio Okamura SPD

Prague, June 12 (CTK) – The mainstream rightist extremist groupings are no longer politically relevant and their agenda was most efficiently adopted by the anti-EU Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), according to the latest report drawn up by the Czech Interior Ministry and released today.

 

However, the SPD cannot be denoted as extremist according to the definition used by the Interior Ministry, the office said.

 

The two mainstream extreme rightist parties, the Workers’ Party of Social Justice (DSSS) and the National Democracy (ND), have behaved quite passively and its members basically only watched some events interesting to them, to which they tend to react.

 

“The decline in the public events of rightist extremists is likely to be bound with the effort of some of its militants to be active through football fights,” the report said.

 

Much more attention was aroused by the manifestations of the SPD relating to the purchase of the pig farm in Lety, the site of a World War Two concentration camp for the Roma, it added.

 

The report said in this connection the police had started checking three SPD lawmakers and it also cited the charges levelled against its former secretary Jaroslav Stanik over what may be qualified as racist statements made in the restaurant of the Chamber of Deputies.

 

The webpage Aktualne.cz recently quoted from the Interior Ministry annual report for 2017 which was critical of the SPD as it was choosing similar topics as rightist extremists and adopting similar views of them.

 

In some cases, the rhetoric by SPD officials is even more radical, says the report that was submitted to the government, but not yet approved.

 

The SPD is of the view that the report was leaked to the media in order to harm it politically.

 

The report said extremist entities had staged 49 events in the first three months of the year, which was 44 fewer over the past year.

 

“Of the total number, 42 events were associated with leftist extremism and seven with rightist extremists,” it added.

 

The anarchist scene has focused on solidarity events with imprisoned or prosecuted anarchists, especially from Russia and Spain. Czech anarchists also expressed support to Kurds.

 

In the first three months of the year, the police recorded 49 criminal acts with extremist motivation, which was 17 more than a year ago. Almost one half of them occurred in Prague.

 

These were mostly the cases of support and promotion of the movements suppressing human rights and freedoms.