The Covid-19 as an Impulse or a Threat: Czech Party Congresses in the Light of the Pandemic

More than two years after the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic we can already look at the way the political parties adapted themselves to the new conditions and especially how far were they able to cope with the necessity to live online. One of the possible ways to analyze such transformation is to focus on one of the most important moment of internal life for all the parties, i.e. their congresses (or conferences). On one hand such gatherings are the high point of the internal life and party democracy and on the other hand, they are also an important moment of self-presentation and medialization. If the context of the pandemic is well known all over the world, the ways parties reacted and still react to this new situation was and still is very different indeed and our assumption is that all in all the parties tried to avoid online congresses for different reasons. If the classical party congress is a way to meet, to gather and to socialize the elite, and to present the party externally (as a united, effective and meaningful collective actor) but even internally. The possibility to propose an online congress leads nevertheless to the limitation of these functions and implies the solving of some preliminary problems (technical and financial aspects, in some cases, considering the average age of the ranked members and delegates the digitalization should be a huge problem). If for some parties the switching into the online life was logical and "natural" (the Pirates, the Greens), some others did so under the constraint of the internal and electoral crisis (the Social Democrats), some were prepared to adapt (the Mayors) and some others preferred to wait and postpone the congress (ANO 2011, ODS, or the Christian-democrats), even if all of them implemented some relevant forms of digitalization and therefore an online congress was a possibility (or a necessity in case of lockdown extension). The aim of this paper is to propose a comparative analysis of these congresses under the Covid-19 stress.