Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/248
Ostrava 13, Trnava 9, Nové Zámky 11, Turčanský Svatý Martin 11, Báňská Bystřice 7, Liptavský Svatý Mikuláš 6, Košice 7, Prešov 10. This makes 281 members. There remain 19 seats to be filled; 9 belong to Rusinia, a part of which is still occupied by Roumanians, 9 to Teschen which is now under control of an international commission preparatory to the plebiscite, and 1 to the district of Hlučin, recently ceded by Germany and not yet organized. The senate districts are as follows: Praha 23 senators, Hradec Králové 11, Mladá Boleslav 15, Louny 14, Plzeň 15, Brno 17, Moravská Ostrava 16, Turč. Sv. Martin 10, Lipt. Sv. Mikuláš 7, Prešov 5, Nové Zámky 9; total 142 senators, leaving 4 for Teschen and 4 for Rusinia to be elected.
No independent candidates could enter the contest; only party tickets signed by a certain percentage of voters were recognized. That helps to account for the unusual number of parties, for there could be no independent candidates. It should be further noted that not all the parties ran in all the districts. In the elections for the chamber the largest number of parties competed in the Plzeň district, namely 15, and in the senatorial elections in Plzeň also 13 parties were in the race. Of the total number of 22 parties 6 did not succeed in electing a single candidate, which leaves 16 parties represented in the new chamber of deputies. Several of them, however, have since the elections consolidated.
Another factor which is responsible for the multiplication of parties in the Czechoslovak Republic is the presence of several minority races, at present Germans and Magyars, later when the vote is taken in Rusinia and Teschen, also a few Rusins and perhaps Poles. Czech parties may combine with each other or support one another, and so will Czechs and Slovaks vote for one another; even the Magyars to a small extent voted on April 18 for Slovak candidates. But a Czech will of course never vote for a German political party, neither will a German vote for the Czechs. Under the generous minority representation provided for in the franchise law for parliamentary elections everyone could vote for the party of his choice without fear that his vote would be thrown away; but in municipal elections, for instance, a Czech socialist in a German town in northern Bohemia will vote for a Czech bourgeois, rather than for a German socialist. The result is that both Czechs and Germans have their own parties, and in electoral districts racially mixed the number of parties is truly excessive.
A peculiar feature of the Czechoslovak election law is the second and third scrutiny. In each electoral district the total number of votes cast is divided by the number of deputies (or senators) to be elected for the district. Each party elects in the first scrutiny as many deputies as this quotient is contained in the total number of votes it received. If the total number of votes cast in the district is 240,000 and the number of deputies to be elected is 12, a party receiving 35,000 votes elects one man straight out—the first name on its ticket—and the fraction of 15,000 is then added to fractions from other electoral districts by a central election board. The party thus gets one or more deputies on this second scrutiny. This leaves still some fractions and a number of seats to be filled, and on third scrutiny the parties with the highest fractions get the few remaining seats. But no party is considered upon second or third scrutiny which did not elect at least one deputy in some district on first scrutiny. This complicated scheme of voting has the merit of securing to each political group in the Republic a proportionate representation in parliament.
The election campaign lasted about a month. It was a hot campaign. Practically all the daily and weekly newspapers are strict party organs, and they did not hesitate to attack all the other parties and party organs. Meetings were held in every town and village by socialists of all brands, national democrats, agrarians, clericals and the smaller parties. Tons of paper were wasted in posters, circulars and sample ballots. And while every party prophesied a great victory for its banners, nobody really expected any substantial change of sentiment from the results shown at the municipal elections in June 1919. At that time the social democrats received 29.80% of the votes, republican party of the country side 21.36%, Czechoslovak socialists 15.93%, people’s party (Catholic) 9.81% and national democrats 8.58%, with the rest scattered. Speculation as to the result of the first parliamentary elections was centered upon the result in Slovakia, where the voting of