Letná, Thirty Years On

JAN 01 2019 · 12:00

Letná, 16 November 2019. A quarter-million gather on the same plain Dubček addressed in 1989, this time against Andrej Babiš. The crowd does not jingle keys. Place: Letná plain, above the Vltava Figures: Mikuláš Minář, organizer (Million Moments for Democracy) · Andrej Babiš, prime minister (subject of the protest) · the surviving members of Civic Forum, present in front On November 24 and 25, 1989, half a million Czechs and Slovaks had gathered on the Letná plain, the wide grassy bluff above the Vltava where army parades had been held under the communists. Dubček spoke from the rostrum, his first Prague crowd in twenty-one years. The plain has carried the meaning ever since: when something has to be said in public and at scale, Letná is the room. On the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution, the citizens' initiative Million Moments for Democracy calls another rally. The organizer, Mikuláš Minář, is twenty-six, a theology student who was not born when the Wall fell. The proximate cause is Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, whose Agrofert holdings are the subject of European Commission investigations into conflict of interest and the misuse of structural funds.