Syrian refugees define Czech politics

Czech PM Bohuslav Sobotka has a curious way of governing: He takes a firm position on something, and then a few weeks or months later, he completely reverses himself. He did it with his anti-Havelian foreign policy before he went to the U.S., and now he has done it with his policy of not accepting Syrian refugees. Surprisingly, he gets away with it, because people have come to expect him to be utterly spineless. Nor does it bother his main coalition partner, ANO, because Andrej Babiš uses the same kind of strategy. What he says today might morph into the exact opposite tomorrow. ČSSD and ANO initially do the populist thing (reject Muslim refugees, for example), and then under international pressure, they fall into line and adopt a policy that we would have expected all along from a center-left government. How strange that it took Syrian refugees to tell us who is on the Left and who is on the Right of Czech politics.