Fight fire with fire: From transactional to electoral activism in pandemic times

Movement-party interactions have already been theorized and described, and theses on the countervailing, reinforcement or substitution relation between them have been formulated. Surprisingly, most studies of these interactions avoid to analyze the most exposed and most principle sequence of these interactions – elections and electoral activism where these interactions intensify and demonstrate themselves most clearly. Even more specifically, the aim of our paper is to explore how exactly get activist organizations engaged in electoral activism. To study this problem, we build on a case study from Eastern Europe which has been generally characterized as showing considerable gap between civil society and institutionalized (electoral) politics. Existing data suggest that post-socialist countries continuously display higher distrust to political institutions and significant detachment between citizens/activism and institutional politics than other developed countries. This is also why the concept of transactional activism (professionalized advocacy groups forming instrumental coalitions and entering into low-key exchanges and negotiations with officials and institutions) was developed to describe post-socialist reality. More specifically, we trace the development of Czech activist organization Million Moments for Democracy (MMD), which was established in 2018 as a reaction to the result of parliamentary elections which were won by Andrej Babiš, an agricultural tycoon. Babiš gained his political power through mobilizing discontent citizens via new political movement. It was established in 2012, gained second largest share of votes in 2013 parliamentary elections, and won the parliamentary elections in 2017. Babiš became prime minister and launched managerial-populist style of governing the country. In our paper, we aim at understand how a transactional activism has become an electoral one. An unusual story in post-socialist settings may bring deeper understanding of the emergence of electoral activism in general. Specifically, we aim to trace, identify and describe linkage mechanisms through which MMD evolved from the small civic organization to the sponsor of the largest Czech protest mobilizations since 1989. Generally, we focus on the group formation as a transactional activist organization, on its repertoire and engagement in mobilization efforts, approaching the institutionalized actors (parties) and finally engaging in large-scale electoral activism. Particularly, we assess key aspects of MMD evolution: its framing strategies, its public protest strategies, its cooperation strategies and its intra-organizational processes in order to capture all kind of shifts in its trajectory and link these shifts back to other actors in the field and political context. Apart from “usual suspects”, we also inspect how existing post-socialist cultural environment (anti-communist discourse and politics of memory) was appropriated by MMD, and also how circumstances of COVID pandemic affected its strategies. Our paper builds primarily on documents, public statements, videos and other formats of information produced by the MMD, semi-structured interviews with its leaders, and claim-making data (2018-2021) retrieved from public media electronic database.