From Elitist Campaigns to Popular Protest?

One or two decades earlier, the debate over the quality of civil societies in CEE countries became both heated and popular. Concept of transactional activism was developed to depict the moment of certain detachment of organized civil society organizations from citizens (and vice versa). Many studies were published to show how environmental or human rights NGOs operate rather within networks of other similar groups than as a mobilizing agent turning to the masses. However, there have been some recent signs of changing patterns of civil society organizing. So called new urban activism consisting of new grassroots initiatives in various spheres of life has been “discovered” as more and more prominent, reaching from local neighborhood initiatives to cultural or even political issues and projects. While new participatory dimension of contemporary activism has been identified, it is still difficult to estimate whether we see changing patterns or just an irregularity. To inspect this trajectory, the paper shall focus on a case of political activism, explicitly targeting Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš. Babiš gained his political power through mobilizing discontent citizens via his political movement. The movement (ANO 2011) was established in 2012, it gained second largest share of votes in 2013 elections, and won the elections in 2017. Since 2015, Babiš and his movement became the target of political activism of various actors, aiming at his resignations. Many collective actors were involved in the campaign, and the campaign started to change – both in terms of issues or framing but also in terms of mode if activism, starting with small meetings of professionalized agents (political parties) and ending up as series of mobilizations in the squares. The paper aims at exploring the changing modes of Czech political activism and conceptualizing this change from networks to masses. The paper builds on protest event analysis of protest against Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic (2015-2019) based on the database of Czech News Agency, and focusing specifically on the organizing mode (transactional vs. participatory) and its justification.