The Czech Republic has just taken a chilling step backward—one with echoes of fascist repression and Cold War witch-hunts. In a near-unanimous vote, the Chamber of Deputies, the country’s legislature, approved amendments to the Criminal Code on May 30, 2025, that would punish “support and promotion of the communist movement” with prison sentences of up to ten years.
Ten years simply for organizing, publishing, teaching, agitating, or merely expressing solidarity with the communist project. In other words, ten years for daring to challenge capitalism.
This isn’t some fringe proposal by neo-fascists in the street. It’s the action of a national legislature in a member state of the European Union—a so-called liberal democracy. And it wasn’t opposed by a single party in the chamber. Let that sink in.
Though the Senate and President have not yet ratified the bill, its adoption seems imminent. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), the target of this repression, is sounding the alarm. “This new law clearly targets the party,” writes Milan Krajča, KSČM vice-chair, in a call for international solidarity. “It follows similar anti-communist attempts in other countries of the European Union and abroad.”
The KSČM has every right to be outraged. Founded in 1989, the party is the successor of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which led the reconstruction of the country after WWII, built the industrial and social infrastructure that the Czech and Slovak people still rely on today, and resisted fascism. Since the counterrevolution of 1989, the party has been hounded, marginalized, and now may be banned outright—not for any crime, but for advocating for the working class.
The Czech case is not unique. This is the latest example in a growing pattern: Liberal democracies that claim to be committed to the rights of assembly, speech, and ideological pluralism are increasingly turning to draconian policies when challenged from the left. In many cases, they’re also the same parties voting for or leading the massive arms buildup across the continent.
Take Germany. In recent years, the German state has harassed and surveilled members of the German Communist Party (DKP) and Junge Welt, one of the country’s few socialist newspapers. Berlin authorities attempted to remove the DKP from the list of registered parties in 2021 on the flimsiest of technicalities. In a country that was once the center of anti-communism and home to Nazism, it’s revealing that the Communist Party is seen as a threat—while the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become one of the largest parties in Germany.
In the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, communist symbols and parties are outright banned. The goal of these laws are historical erasure, locally called “decommunization.” These governments, supported by NATO and the EU, portray themselves as defenders of democracy while criminalizing the very ideology that defeated fascism on their soil 80 years ago.
In Ukraine—a country supposedly on the front lines of the fight for democracy—all communist parties have been banned outright since 2015. Their assets have been seized, and their leaders are exiled or imprisoned. These actions were taken by a government hailed by the West as a beacon of “democracy”—a government that openly collaborates with Nazis and Banderites.
Even outside Europe, the pattern persists. In India, the Narendra Modi government has escalated repression against communists, socialists, and trade unionists. In Israel—the supposed “only democracy in the Middle East”—NGOs and organizations that advocate for peace and oppose apartheid are being declared terrorist organizations. The government repeatedly tried to ban the leaders of Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) from the Knesset (Israel’s parlement), and its members are often harrased by police—sometimes facing physical violence.
Even here in the United States, President Donald Trump has used his office to silence, arrest, and disappear peace activists—setting a precedent for using state violence against left-wing dissent generally.
What we are witnessing is not some accidental drift. It is the political logic of capitalist crisis. When neoliberalism fails to deliver even the minimum of stability—when workers can no longer afford food, healthcare, to heat their homes, or to even have homes—the state scrambles to preserve the system by any means necessary. And when fascism becomes useful, liberalism becomes its willing accomplice.
The Czech amendment criminalizing “promotion of the communist movement” is not about preventing violence or extremism. It is not about historical trauma. It is about silencing criticism of capitalism. It is about defanging and weakening the working people of the world, in the hope that they will have no way to advocate for a different world.
As with all news-analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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