In Prague, It’s Politics With a ‘Happy Face’

If the symbol of the Romanian revolution is the national flag with a hole where the Communist emblem has been ripped away, the symbol of Czechoslovakia’s political transformation is a “happy face.”

It comes from the stylized initials in Czech for Civic Forum, the popular movement that rose from nothing to overthrow the hard-line Communist regime last year in a matter of days. The name in Czech is Obcanske Forum , and the “O” is rendered with eyes and a smiling mouth.

Since the first of the year, the symbol has spread well beyond the organization. The date often appears with a happy face in place of the zero in 1990.

The happy face serves as a reminder of the extraordinary influence wielded by Civic Forum, and the relative optimism with which most political analysts view Czechoslovakia’s prospects for what may be the least painful transition to democracy in the old Soviet Bloc.

Still, with June 8 proposed as the date for Czechoslovakia’s first free national elections in more than 40 years, the euphoric smile of victory is increasingly appearing together with the calculated smile of a political campaign.

The day for the elections, according to a government spokesman, may be confirmed at today’s session of the so-called round table, the gathering of representatives of Czechoslovakia’s main political forces.

Other sources, who take part regularly in these talks, said that a complicated formula involving different electoral procedures for each house of a restructured, bicameral legislature has been proposed. They said the present legislature is expected to rubber-stamp whatever formula is agreed to at the round table.

Under this proposal, there would be a people’s chamber made up of about 10 representatives from each of a dozen electoral districts. The parties would put up regional lists of candidates, with the distribution of seats based on the share of the popular vote received by each party or coalition of parties.

There would be a second chamber made up of people elected as individuals. A simple majority of votes cast would decide the winner.

Martin Palous, a member of Civic Forum’s inner circle, said that although the group is not a political party, it will make it clear which candidates it supports, including independents.

According to a poll conducted by the Sociological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and published this week by the Socialist Party newspaper, the biggest single bloc of voters is undecided. Nearly 21% said they do not know which party they will support, and 16% said they are not sure--but will definitely not vote for the Communists.

The Communist Party polled 14.4% in the poll, compared to 12.1% for Civic Forum. The results are misleading, because Civic Forum is an umbrella organization for supporters of a wide variety of non-Communist political groups.

No Polling in Prague

Pollster Hynek Jerabek said Wednesday in an interview that the survey, conducted in the second half of December, included 652 randomly selected individuals in 53 provincial towns and villages. There was no polling in Prague, where Civic Forum’s strength is greatest, and in a number of villages, respondents were not aware that Civic Forum plans to endorse candidates.

The Czechoslovak Socialist Party, which polled 12.7% in the Sociological Institute study, and the Peoples’ Party, mostly Roman Catholic, which polled 6.7%, both supported Civic Forum in its drive to oust the Communists, and both are represented in the interim coalition government. Social Democrats, Greens and other small parties, many of which also support Civic Forum, polled a collective 17.3%.

Meanwhile, Czechs and Slovaks continue to organize themselves into new political and social groups so rapidly that Western diplomats say they have given up trying to keep track of them.

This week’s additions included the Buddhist Society of Czechoslovakia and the Neutrality Party, which proposes to minimize the army and model Czechoslovakia’s foreign relations on Switzerland’s.

Remnants of Communist protocol, such as addressing the president, Cabinet ministers and military officers as “comrade,” have been relegated to the trash heap. The youth daily Mlada Fronta (Young Front) reported Wednesday that students in some schools have been forced as punishment to write 100 times, “I will not address the teacher as ‘comrade.’ ”

Police officers, feared agents of the old regime, are now noticeably absent from the streets of Prague--clearly a move to eliminate what could be a public irritant. “It’s almost as if they were on strike,” a taxi driver commented.

While other East European countries forecast enormous unemployment as their inefficient, planned economies are put on a market basis, Czechoslovak television is advertising free daily transportation to anyone willing to work at the Skoda automobile plant in Mlada Boleslav. The Skoda work force, made up in part by convicts, was decimated by a New Year amnesty under which 23,260 prison inmates have already been freed.

The interim government established last month has already devalued the Czechoslovak currency by about 80%; other inevitable austerity moves may be put off until after the elections.

Civic Forum’s domination of the political scene may not show up in the polls, but it is clear in other ways. As a Western diplomat put it: “If you really want to get something, you don’t go to a government office--you go to Civic Forum, and then you get a call from the ministry.”

When a Canadian dignitary visited Prague recently, all his appointments, including a talk with the Communist prime minister, Marian Calfa, were arranged through Civic Forum.

The movement’s original leadership, whose televised features became familiar to viewers around the world, has been transformed by success.

Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who formed Civic Forum last November, moved out of his second-floor offices in the group’s central headquarters this week. He was named president of Czechoslovakia last month, and he now conducts business from Hradcany Castle, the official residence of the head of state.

Jiri Dienstbier, a former spokesman for the movement, is now foreign minister, and three other leaders also have Cabinet portfolios. A woman who was the translator at the movement’s early press conferences has been nominated as ambassador to the United States.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was reorganized last weekend with the aim of shedding its Stalinist image and becoming a more modern, if still leftist, movement.

Vasil Mohorita, first secretary of the party’s restructured executive body, said it has lost about 140,000 of its 1.7 million members, and other party sources said it is expecting to lose as many as 400,000 more.

Mohorita and Ladislav Adamec, the party chairman, warned that the party, which ruled unchallenged for more than 40 years, now seems likely to wind up in the opposition after the elections.

Havel Targeted

Still, the Communists are not giving up. They have been trying to make electoral capital out of a couple of controversial actions by President Havel.

One was a suggestion in a pre-Christmas speech that Czechoslovakia should publicly apologize to Sudeten Germans who were treated brutally during their expulsion from the country after World War II. The remark stirred up resentment among those who feel that Nazi Germany committed far greater crimes against Czechoslovakia, and the Communist Party newspaper led the attack on Havel.

The party has also tried to capitalize on fears that Havel’s amnesty, which covers an estimated 30,000 prisoners, will lead to a crime wave.

Both moves were in character for Havel, who has championed a high standard of public morality through 20 years of political dissidence.

“Even if the average Czechoslovak didn’t have the same moral strength he has shown, the response to him shows that this upright behavior really strikes a chord here,” a Western diplomat said.

But he added that Havel “is learning very quickly that speaking with a pure moral voice in the day-to-day politics of a pre-election period can be fraught with difficulties.”

Another diplomat said the biggest danger he sees is that Civic Forum will be corrupted by its power and will use it to forestall the introduction of real political pluralism.

“Is it avoidable?” the diplomat said. “I doubt it.”

He conceded, however, that Czechoslovakia has perhaps the strongest prewar democratic traditions of any of the East European nations trying to break with the past. And Civic Forum, he added, has “managed until now quite fantastically.”