Politics of the Debtfare State: Repoliticizing the Czech Debt Enforcement Order and Its Limits

Abstract

In Czechia, one of the statistically most equal and least indebted states, almost one-tenth of its (mostly low-income) population is entrapped in debt enforcement proceedings. I foreground such a contradiction to investigate the politics of the debtfare state in East-Central Europe (ECE). This nuances the scholarship on the repolitization of the ECE neoliberal state by populist forces and their instrumentalization of its middle-class welfare state strategies in the 2010s. Identifying the Czech debt enforcement industry as a leading poverty industry in ECE, I explore its depoliticizing origins in the Debt Enforcement Order (DEO), a flagship legal framework regulating the creditor–debtor–bailiff relations. Interpreting the political struggle over the DEO-centered debtfare state strategy, I then trace its limited repolitization since the mid-2010s, which redirects its reforms from their original pro-creditor and -bailiff prioritization to a prioritization of low-income debtors. This politics complements the repolitization of the neoliberal state beyond populism.

Keywords

critical political economy debtfare state East-Central Europe financialization household debt neoliberalism populism repolitization

Introduction

Czechia is one of the most statistically equal and least indebted states in the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The OECD statistics rank it as the second most equal one, the second-best for the poor, and one of the least indebted societies.¹ Like some other East-Central European (ECE) countries—especially Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—Czechia has a relatively robust but highly selective middle-class welfare state strategy, which still makes its neoliberal state rather socially protective (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019). This welfarist bias is contradicted by the contemporary overindebtedness that entraps around a tenth of the Czech adult population—mostly low-income debtors—in debt enforcement proceedings. The contradiction asks for foregrounding the debtfare state as another state strategy for low-income populations besides the middle-class welfare state in ECE. By doing so, I explore this understudied politics of the debtfare state strategy-making as integral to the overall power struggle over the ECE neoliberal state formation since the early 2000s. Besides the selective welfare state (Lendvai-Bainton and Szelewa, 2021; Stubbs and Lendvai-Bainton, 2020), I can thus document how the Czech politics of debtfare state strategy-making and the resultant household overindebtedness constitute another origin of the overall repolitization of this neoliberal state in the 2010s.

Foregrounding Czechia, I further cross-fertilize two Critical Political Economy scholarships. The state-theoretical scholarship (Drahokoupil, 2009; Jessop, 2007; Shields, 2015) follows the neoliberal state formation and its strategy-making to discuss the “populist” (Scheiring, 2021) origins and practices of their “[re]politization” (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019; Gagyi, 2021) in ECE. Using the debtfare-state scholarship (Soederberg, 2014), I foreground the role of household financialization (Mikuš and Rodik, 2021; Streeck, 2017) in this state formation and repolitization. First, because the state-theoretical scholarship focuses on middle-class welfarism to explain both processes, I use the debtfare-state scholarship to identify the Czech debtfarist contradiction in them. While such a welfare state strategy complements the dominant manufacturing-led industrial strategy (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019), I explore a distinct credit-led debtfare state as another state strategy in ECE. Second, the historicization of the Czech politics of debtfare state strategy-making (Hoření Samec, 2021; Šitera, 2021) nuances both scholarships’ views on the repolitization of household financialization and the overall neoliberal state in this postsocialist semiperiphery. Rather than being led solely by emancipatory (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2019; Roberts and Soederberg, 2014) or non-emancipatory (Mikuš, 2019; Scheiring, 2021) forces, I find this repolitization to be led by their contradictory coalitions and unacknowledged consensuses beyond populism.

Two contributions are offered. The first one conceptualizes an ECE form of a postsocialist and semiperipheral debtfare state that is distinguishable from the other global forms (Soederberg, 2014). The strategy includes a segment of consumers and especially mortgage lending by foreign-owned banks to aspiring middle-class debtors (Bohle, 2014; Hoření Samec, 2021) but also involves an underresearched segment of poverty industries for low-income debtors. In Czechia, this revolves around the so-called Debt Enforcement Order (exekuční řád, DEO), a flagship legal framework regulating, according to one of the Czech Ministers of Justice, the privatized “creditor-debtor-bailiff” (Pospíšil, 2009) relations. Hence, I explore the Czech DEO-centered segment for low-income populations to further understand such postsocialist and semiperipheral features. In 2019, this segment regulated principal debts worth CZK 297 billion and debt enforcement (exekuce) proceedings, including fees and interests, with an overall estimated value of CZK 1 trillion (Otevřená společnost, 2020). Accounting for 5% or an estimated 18% of the Czech GDP, this makes the creditors and private bailiffs (exekutor) a leading chain of poverty industries in ECE. At the top of this chain, the debt enforcement industry has rather limited origins of subprime and predatory nonbank loans but also public financial sanctions against mostly low-income households (Hábl et al., 2021; Prokop, 2020). Still, the DEO submitted around 10% of the adult population to approximately 4.5 million—multiple—debt enforcement proceedings (Figure 1) by the late 2010s, which makes the reforms of its legal framework a prime political struggle.

Figure 1.

Debt enforcement proceedings and debtors subjected to these proceedings (thousands per year).

The second contribution historicizes the reform-enacting politics of the DEO-centered debtfare state-making to better interpret the overall repoliticization of the ECE neoliberal state and the role of debtfarism therein. Tracing the DEO reform process since its 2001 enactment (Parliament of the Czech Republic, 2001), I refine the historicization of the neoliberal state formation. Its phases of market-oriented “disembedding” in the 2000s and the socially protective “re-embedding” in the 2010s (Scheiring and Szombati, 2020) are then interpreted as periods of depolitization and repolitization (Jessop, 2014), respectively. The last distinctive feature of the Czech debtfare state is foregrounded this way. Originally a side effect of a selective welfare state for the prioritized middle classes (Vanhuysse, 2009), the DEO-centered segment becomes one of its market-oriented replacements for the deprioritized low-income households (Trlifajová and Hurrle, 2019). The DEO politics is then explored as a political struggle between depoliticizing (market-oriented pro-creditor and -bailiff) forces and repoliticizing (socially protective pro-debtor) ones. The mid-2010s pro-debtor repolitization denotes a reform period that challenged the 2000s depolitization period of pro-creditor and -bailiff reforms due to the overindebtedness emergency (Figure 1). Finally, its limits are studied as both set in the depoliticizing regulatory origins and rhetorically upheld by the depoliticizing forces whereby repolitization co-produces debtfare states rather than abolishing them.

A historical-materialist approach to interpretative analysis is operationalized to synthesize the two scholarships with respect to the two contributions (Brand et al., 2021; Soederberg, 2014: 49). The approach traces the DEO politics as primarily a rhetorical struggle of rival forces over a reform process that regulatorily enacts the DEO-centered legal framework as a debtfare state strategy. The digital archive of the Czech Parliament is used to interpret it through studying a parliamentary conflict.² Finally, the approach delineates the Czech debtfarism as a depoliticizing set of rhetorical and regulatory practices which tendentially shift this reform-enacting politics to make the state selectively regulate the creditor-debtor-bailiff relations in a market-oriented direction. Identifying these debtfarist pro-creditor and -bailiff practices, I simultaneously explore the set of repoliticizing pro-debtor ones which rhetorically challenge the debtfarism to shift the politics into a more socially protective reform process. Matching such practices with depoliticizing or repoliticizing coalitions of civil society and political forces, the approach remains cognizant of the contextual limits when interpreting their rhetorical struggle over shifting the state regulation of creditor–debtor–bailiff relations in one or another direction. These historical–material limits reside in the power and regulatory relations of the neoliberal state formation on the ECE postsocialist semiperiphery.

This article proceeds as follows. I conceptualize the politics of debtfare state strategy-making as inherent to the formation and repolitization of the ECE neoliberal state. Then, the de- and repoliticizing civil society and political forces are identified to contextualize the analysis of the Czech parliamentary struggle over the DEO reforms. Finally, this analysis historicizes the formation and repoliticization of the Czech debtfare state and its depoliticizing limits.

Conceptualizing the Politics of the Debtfare State in ECE

This section conceptualizes the debtfarism and the debtfare state strategy-making within the ECE neoliberal state while operationalizing the analysis of the DEO politics. Regarding the conceptualization, I synthetize the debtfare-state and state-theoretical scholarships on the ECE form of the state (Drahokoupil, 2009; Shields, 2015; Soederberg, 2014: 46–65). This state primarily protects middle-class labor and foreign-owned manufacturing well-being and interests through its welfare state and industrial strategies (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019). Debtfarism is then a depoliticizing set of rhetorical and regulatory practices. Such practices direct the politics into enacting the ECE debtfare state strategy so that it complements these two—middle-class and corporate welfare—strategies with a market-oriented regulation of creditor–debtor–bailiff relations. Hence, debtfarism is revealed to co-constitute those already identified depoliticizing rhetorical-cum-regulatory practices that underpin the power struggle over the ECE neoliberal state’s formation and its strategy-making: workfarism, austerity, corporate welfarism, and especially middle-class welfarism.

The ECE form of debtfare state is thus distinguishable from the original conceptualizations of the debtfare state in the global South and the United States (Soederberg, 2014). While they form a dominant credit-led state strategy besides residual welfare states, the ECE form originates as a side-effect and then a credit-led replacement of a robust but highly selective welfare state in this EU’s manufacturing-led semiperiphery. As a less dominant state strategy, it is divided between two segments (Hoření Samec, 2021: 153). The first segment reproduces the middle-class prioritization. Dominated by foreign-owned banks (Bohle, 2014; Mikuš, 2019), the first segment substitutes the privatized socialist housing with mortgage lending and also consumer loans to aspiring middle-class households.

Foregrounding the second segment for low-income debtors, I follow those researching the chains of poverty industries in ECE (Burton, 2017; Kupka et al., 2021; Mikuš, 2020; Mikuš and Rodik, 2021). In Czechia, this DEO-centered segment regulates a debt enforcement industry-led chain of poverty industries. Since its 2001 origins, the DEO-centered reform process has formed a comprehensive regulatory framework that includes the Consumer Credit Law, the Insolvency Law, the Civil Procedure Code, and other related regulations (Parliament of the Czech Republic, 2001). This captures the working poor, the unemployed, disadvantaged ethnic minorities, and other failed debtors (Prokop, 2020; Stenning et al., 2010). It also regulates subprime or predatory non-bank lenders and any other public and private liabilities—for example, unpaid health or social insurance, municipal charges or neglected contractual fees and penalties, or overpriced rents for substandard housing—that the debt enforcement industry could turn into profitable proceedings (Hábl et al., 2021; Hoření Samec, 2021).

Moving to a historical–materialist operationalization of the interpretive analysis, I explore the politics of the DEO reform process as a rhetorical power struggle. Tracing it through a narrower parliamentary conflict, I simultaneously recognize the historically forming context of material power and regulatory relations which structurally limits its selectivity in a depoliticizing direction. As in the case of any form of state or state strategy (Drahokoupil, 2009; Jessop, 2007; Offe and Keane, 1984), the politics of the DEO (re)inscribes a structural selectivity in this debtfare state strategy-making, which then institutionally prioritizes the interests, rights, powers, or well-being of one social group over those of others in regulating the creditor-debtor-bailiff relations. I delineate two rival types of rhetorics—the depoliticizing and repoliticizing types—which consist of either market-oriented or socially protective morals and rationalities (Mikuš, 2020; Scheiring, 2020; Šitera, 2021). This is done by tracing whether and how these types (re)inscribe either a debtfarist pro-creditor and -bailiff selectivity or challenge it in favor of a pro-debtor selectivity. Likewise, I identify two types of often contradictory coalitions of civil society and political forces that instrumentalize such rival rhetorics into unacknowledged consensuses or parliamentary majorities to rationalize the reform process and regulatorily steer it in one or another direction. The postsocialist and semiperipheral context of the ECE neoliberal state formation makes sense of the depoliticizing origins of this politics and its limits to repoliticizing the reform process.

Depolitization

Here I proceed with conceptualizing the depolitization and repolitization and the operationalization of their analysis. Depolitization denotes the period when the pro-creditor and -bailiff forces and practices, as well as their market-oriented coalitions and consensuses, prevailed in the reform process. The DEO’s 2001 origins and the reform process of its regulatory framework are then explored through a nuanced periodization. Following the 1990s postsocialist period, the ECE neoliberal state formation is seen to be conditioned by a political consensus among a coalition of center-right and center-left forces on prioritizing middle-class welfarism and foreign-led reindustrialization. This postsocialist centrist consensus simultaneously exposed the deprioritized low-income populations to a market-oriented “disembedding” in the 2000s only to be disrupted by the global economic crisis and then repoliticized toward a socially protective “re-embedding” in the 2010s (Scheiring and Szombati, 2020). I interpret the 2000s as a depolitization period to understand its debtfarist dimension and the mid-2010s pro-debtor repolitization. The depoliticizing rhetoric is then explored in terms of how it legitimizes this debtfarist exposure of low-income population to the DEO-centered debt enforcement as a form of rational economic process and market justice that is integral to any normal European market economy.

Regulatorily, the Czech debtfare state strategy originates from this centrist coalition and its consensus on the ECE state restructuring, which is bound to the EU’s accession and the foreign-led reindustrialization in the 2000s (Drahokoupil, 2009; Shields, 2015). The scholarship recognizes the dominant practices of corporate welfarism and middle-class welfarism. They enact a selective prioritization of the interests, rights, and powers of (primarily foreign) capital in industrial strategies and of middle-class labor in welfare states (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019). The first segment of ECE debtfare states replicates this selectivity. It regulates consumer and especially mortgage lending to aspiring middle-class debtors which is supplied by foreign-owned banks and sourced also by foreign currency in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere (Bohle, 2014; Mikuš and Rodik, 2021). Going beyond the scholarship, I interpret the Czech DEO-centered second segment as a market-oriented replacement of this selectivity for low-income debtors. Making them regulatable, it reintegrates their deprioritized households and the emerging debt enforcement-led chain of poverty industries (Burton, 2017; Hoření Samec, 2021; Kupka et al., 2021; Stenning et al., 2010). The austerity and workfarist practices, which retrench and re-enact the welfare state as an active labor market policy (Sirovátka, 2018; Šitera, 2021; Trlifajová and Hurrle, 2019), are found particularly orthodox and key in this reintegration of the low-income labor through formal work and debt relations. I thus identify the debtfarism as co-constituted by them during the enacting of a pro-creditor debt enforcement which obliges low-income debtors to pay their debts through formal work.

Rhetorically, the Czech debtfarism legitimizes such asymmetric creditor-debtor-bailiff relations as integral to this postsocialist enactment of a normal market economy. Siding with the creditor interests and bailiff powers, the depoliticizing forces commit the state to make debts work by forcing the debtors to self-reliantly work their debts off as a form of market justice and rational economic process (Mikuš, 2020; Šitera, 2021). Regarding the state, I identify the rule of law (Soederberg, 2014: 50–52) as a foundational debtfarist rhetoric. Legitimizing bailiffs as rule-of-law enforcers, it equates the creditor interests and the debt enforcement industry’s power with a departure from the socialist past and 1990s unregulated neoliberalization to the desirable EU-style legal frameworks. Concerning the overindebted households, self-reliance or self-responsibility (Gřundělová, 2021; Hoření Samec, 2021; Samec and Hájek, 2019) is another foundational rhetoric that neutralizes the resulting exploitation as a social problem. Along with the austerity and workfarist rhetorics, I document how it rationalizes the debt enforcement proceedings as a re-educative process toward the debtor’s financial literacy and reintegration into the labor market. It thus co-constitutes the political commitment to reeducate the former state socialist populations into self-reliant market individuals. Any debtors and especially low-income ones are made underserving of state protection since this is considered just and rational in a rule-of-law-based economy.

Repolitization

Repolitization, in comparison, denotes a period when the dominant depoliticizing forces and practices, as well as their coalitions and consensuses, are challenged by the repoliticizing ones to reinscribe a socially protective selectivity. I refine the research on the 2010s post-crisis repolitization/“re-embedding” of the ECE neoliberal state by the “populists” (Scheiring, 2021) in government, especially the national conservative ones in Hungary and Poland (Lendvai-Bainton and Szelewa, 2021; Scheiring and Szombati, 2020; Stubbs and Lendvai-Bainton, 2020). While the scholarship exposes their national conservative re-embedding of corporate and middle-class welfarisms, I foreground the mid-2010s pro-debtor shift against the Czech debtfarism and within the ECE debtfare state strategy. In Hungary, Poland, and Croatia, a populist pro-debtor repolitization of their foreign-owned banks and middle-class foreign-currency mortgage and consumer loans is documented (Bohle, 2014; Mikuš, 2019). While Czechia had no foreign-currency loans, the DEO-centered repolitization shows another variety of this repolitization in favor of low-income debtors. Remaining cognizant of the ECE’s power and regulatory limits, I find this repolitization to be produced by a distinct coalition and consensus beyond populism.

Regulatorily, the Czech pro-debtor shift against the creditor interests and the debt enforcement industry is analyzed as belated and limited. The middle-class mortgages remain depoliticized (Samec, 2020), which limits any broader repolitization of debtfarism within the Czech neoliberal state. Amplified by the most orthodox neoliberal crisis management in ECE (Šitera, 2021), the DEO-centered overindebtedness (Figure 1), however, opens a political opportunity for challenging the debtfarism. The new “centrist” or “technocratic” populist party (Scheiring, 2021) ANO in government and the far-right party SPD in opposition belatedly seize this opportunity in the mid-2010s. By doing so, they propel a contradictory coalition of otherwise rival forces that challenged the pre-crisis power relations, albeit within the established regulatory limits. However, the Czech technocratic challenge to corporate welfarism is negligible, while the re-embedding of middle-class welfarism remains limited to the abandonment of orthodox reforms. I interpret the DEO-centered pro-debtor reforms as complementing this limited abandonment of austerity and workfarism (Hoření Samec, 2021; Sirovátka, 2018; Trlifajová and Hurrle, 2019). Such reforms aim to contain the overindebtedness as a legitimacy risk to the neoliberal state while reintegrating the low-income debtors as a cheap workforce into the manufacturing-led industrial strategy.

Rhetorically, the pro-debtor consensus challenges debtfarism through denaturalizing the exploitative debt enforcement in order to make low-income debtors’ rights and well-being deserving of state protection. Three foundational practices are identified among the pro-debtor forces. I trace them in a differentiated rhetorical opposition to the debtfarism and simultaneously to each other while unevenly challenging the market justice and rationalities with those of collective justice or political legitimacy. Political legitimacy (Karwowski, 2019) is a universal rhetoric to be matched with the center-right and -left. It makes the state accountable to its citizens so that the decreasing trust in democratic institutions, rule of law, and the political mainstream is restored without, however, necessarily contradicting debtfarism. Social justice (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2019; Roberts and Soederberg, 2014) is associable with the broader left. As a solidaristic collectivist rhetoric, it challenges the state implication in the exploitation of all the overindebted people when contradicting debtfarism. In contrast, popular justice (Kim, 2020; Mikuš, 2019; Scheiring, 2020) is a solidaristic but nation-centered communitarian rhetoric represented by the far-right and populist forces. It demands that the state protect deserving debtors as ordinary people while selectively excluding ethnic minorities, the unemployed, or the poor from this protection against debtfarism. These three practices are researched as mutually articulated rhetorics.

Soederberg (2014) and Brand et al. (2021) are methodologically followed here. Using the digital archive of the Czech Parliament (Note 2), I interpret the political struggle over the DEO-centered regulatory framework among the members of both of its chambers, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. I identify two types—depoliticizing and repoliticizing—of rhetorical-cum-regulatory practices so that the two types of coalitions of forces are differentiated and compared across six full election periods between 2000 and 2021. I focus on the rhetoric practiced by the ministers of justice, influential members of parliament like the reform proponents and rapporteurs, and other leading party figures. By matching the types of rhetoric with the respective parliamentary members and their parties, and then tracing the predominance of one over another in forming parliamentary majorities, the two periods of depolitization and repolitization can be distinguished. There were 50 parliamentary reform amendments to the DEO-centered framework, of which the 13 most relevant ones are selected here. I therefore study 46 readings in the Chamber of Deputies and 13 readings in the Senate. The excluded amendments include those related to minor issues and the direct transpositions of the EU regulations on financial markets on the eve of Czechia’s EU accession. Their conflict-free transpositions are attributable to the postsocialist consensus on becoming a normal market economy but also to ECE’s semiperipheral limits. I remain cognizant of these broader power and regulatory limits.

Forces of De- and Repolitization

For understanding the parliamentary politics below, this section outlines the broader power struggle between and within the contradictory coalitions of civil society and political forces behind it. I categorize three social forces which co-shape the parliamentary struggle of the fourth deciding force: political parties (Note 2). According to one center-right member of parliament, this struggle is subservient to the ‘media massaging supported by some non-governmental organizations’ (Bauer, 2018). I identify the media and NGOs along with their advocacy leaders as two repoliticizing forces. According to another far-right one, there is a hidden ‘lobby’ (Fiedler, 2017) of the large ‘clientelist and corruption-prone’ (Hábl et al., 2021: 37) bailiffs and creditors. They constitute a depoliticizing force. Although the repolitization was politically mainstreamed by the parliamentary left and the so-called populist parties ANO and SPD before being selectively joined by the center-right, I document its civil society roots.

First, the party-based coalitions and parliamentary majorities for the DEO reforms reflect a political dynamic of the Czech or even ECE neoliberalism (Císař and Navrátil, 2017; Scheiring, 2021; Šitera, 2021). In the 2000s, the pro-creditor and -bailiff majority was consistent with the centrist consensus between the center-left ČSSD and the center-right parties ODS, KDU-ČSL, TOP 09, and STAN, which all alternated between the opposition and government. Since the mid-2000s, the center-right governments and their orthodox crisis management ruptured this consensus under the social protest and opposition from ČSSD and the far-left KSČM. Since the 2013 elections, parliamentary mainstreaming of pro-debtor rhetoric has been primarily captured by the centrist and technocratic ANO being in government, and the far-right SPD being in opposition. Its translation into a pro-debtor consensus cannot be thus attributed to the two ČSSD- and ANO-led common coalition governments between 2014 and 2021. Once KDU-ČSL—in government and then in opposition—and selected opposition parties like STAN and the then-new centrist Pirates expanded this cross-parliamentary coalition, the pro-debtor reform process was enacted within depoliticizing limits.

Second, the NGOs and various social movements make innovations to the repoliticizing rhetoric of social and popular justice or political legitimacy (Císař and Navrátil, 2017; Gagyi, 2021; Mikuš, 2019). From the early involvement of the largest Czech NGO Člověk v tísni to the growing diversity of others, these organizations form a primary pro-debtor force since the mid-2000s. So, I explore the parliamentary mainstreaming of pro-debtor rhetoric and reform as contradictorily building on these civil society innovations and advocacies. Since 2009, the Index of Predatory and later Responsible Lending (Hůle et al., 2017) has been a pioneering sensemaking tool for this mainstreaming. It matched the predatory practices of both large banks and non-bank lenders with the emerging debt enforcement industry. I show how these innovations are reappropriated to spearhead social and popular justice by the far-right SPD, the parliamentary left, and the technocratic ANO. In this context, the 2016 Map of Debt Enforcements (Otevřená společnost, 2020) and the leading civil society advocates (Hábl et al., 2021; Hůle et al., 2017; Prokop, 2020) visualize the overindebtedness as reducing the trust of the most affected peripheral regions, or low-income and, increasingly, middle-class households in the political mainstream and the state. Hence, I explore the rhetorical merger of social justice and political legitimacy against popular justice and how this contradictorily shapes the parliamentary struggle.

Third, media are both a repoliticizing space for and an autonomous force in mainstreaming the various NGO innovations. The reporting on debt enforcement increased rapidly from an average of 5,000 media events per year in the 2000s to 16,600 in the 2010s.³ Linking it with the proliferating reporting on the “poverty business” (Kupka et al., 2018) since 2013, both mainstream and alternative media have labeled “debt traps” or the “debt enforcement business” as a popular, social, and legitimacy problem (Poljakov et al., 2018; Rychlíková et al., 2018). I therefore remain cognizant of how the media condition and co-shape the parliamentary struggle in a pro-debtor direction.

Fourth, NGOs and media are found to co-shape parliamentary politics by exposing the depoliticizing force of “debt business” (Hábl et al., 2021) interests and power. The creditor interests and the debt enforcement industry’s power developed around and further entrench the market-oriented reforms, while the state becomes structurally implicated in their reproduction. These interests and power are officially represented by the semi-private Chamber of Bailiffs as a “self-governing professional organization” (Parliament of the Czech Republic, 2001). Beyond that, parallel lobby networks of the large bailiffs and the large creditors, ranging from banks and insurance companies to municipal and state authorities, influence the parliamentary struggle. Making sense of the institutional and material limits to repolitization in this struggle, I thus recognize the structural selectivity of the public courts and institutions that accept “a passive role, which is often far from neutral but rather facilitates the debt business” (Hábl et al., 2021: 6). The creditor and bailiff lobby networks are simultaneously understood to influence the reform process.

Politics of the Czech Debt Enforcement Order

The analysis of the parliamentary politics of the DEO-centered reform process (Note 2) follows. Interpreting the two-decade-long struggle over the (re)inscription of either creditor interests and bailiff power or debtor rights and well-being among the members of parliament and government, I trace two contradictory coalitions and consensuses that dominate two distinct reform periods: the left-right market-oriented consensus in the 2000s and, since the mid-2010s, the socially protective consensus among the otherwise competing rhetorics of social and popular justice, and political legitimacy. These coalitions originally co-constituted the Czech debtfarism with the other market-oriented practices—those of corporate or middle-class welfarism, austerity, and workfarism—only to later challenge both it and the other practices in a socially protective direction. Although the economic crisis amplified the overindebtedness emergency (Figure 1), I identify the belated mid-2010s shift as deriving from this political struggle. The parliamentary mainstreaming of the pro-debtor rhetoric is attributable to the then-new far-right SPD and technocratic ANO along with the parliamentary left. However, I emphasize that the pro-debtor reform process but also its depoliticizing limits have materialized only once the cross-parliamentary coalition was joined by the center-right parties.

Depolitization

Following the 1990s period of shock-therapy restructuring, the DEO was legally introduced in 2001 on the eve of the country’s EU accession. For the next decade, the cultivation of an effective and efficient creditor-friendly framework of “creditor-debtor-bailiff” (Pospíšil, 2009) relations became integral to signaling the gradualist enactment of a normal, legally regulated market economy to the domestic population, EU bureaucrats, and foreign investors. Enacted through a centrist parliamentary consensus with the support of the center-left government, the framework remained tolerated by the left opposition during the 2000s. Because it is moral and rational to self-reliantly pay one’s own debts in such a normal economy, the pro-creditor debt enforcement could be equated with “improving the execution of law and improving the rule of law” (Koudelka, 2001). The debtfarist rhetoric could thus normalize the DEO as an institutional fix that made the post-1990s restructuring regulatable, while rationalizing it as a market justice for creditors and an educative lesson for the self-reliant citizens to become responsible debtors.

The creditor interests and bailiff power were put at the center of this neoliberal rule-of-law-building. Because the public courts failed to prevent “the creditor rights [from being] curtailed” (Němec, 2000) by irresponsible debtors, the only rational solution was to privatize the debt enforcement as a rather profit-oriented business model. Being entrusted with the state power to resolve creditor-debtor disputes, the semi-private bailiffs promised a “very healthy competitive environment” (Rychetský, 2000) as market-driven law enforcers. Instead of any free market relations, the state had to however intervene further by handing them more powers. For the sake of the efficiency, other public and private actors, such as banks, social and health security agencies, or employers, were subjected to a demand for “collaboration” (Křeček, 2003) in providing all the data on debtors at their disposal. Guaranteeing the sustainability of the privatized model, the financial “protection of bailiffs” (Benda, 2007) was also necessary. Due to the risk of levying a value below the operational costs due to the destitution of many debtors, the bailiffs’ powers to impose additional procedural fees and fines on them had to be naturally preserved. The law enforcement rhetoric thereby normalizes the power asymmetry in favor of the emergent debt enforcement industry.

Efficiency and effectiveness extend this rule-of-law rhetoric once the power abuse of imposing excessive fees and property seizures through fraudulent debt enforcement is exposed by the NGOs and media. Since the mid-2000s, these tropes have been used by the center-right parties to downplay the abuse as a systemic social problem and rationalize it as merely a regulatory problem. The effectiveness trope normalizes the growing amount of debt enforcement proceedings as a sign of successful regulation where the abuse is a rare exception from the rule. Regardless of these “rare cases” with much media coverage, the creditors finally regain their claims “in a bigger scope, in a bigger number of cases and, above all, more quickly” (Oberfalzer, 2007). Then, the efficiency trope disguises the systemic abuse as just another failure of the state regulatory power, which can be cultivated by enacting a “more efficient oversight” (Pospíšil, 2007) of the debt enforcement environment. In effect, the bailiffs’ powers decreased vis-à-vis the state but were simultaneously increased in their relation to debtors. Moreover, the Chamber of Bailiffs became more systematically supervised by the Ministry of Justice, and the debt enforcement proceedings became supervised by the public courts from afar. Removing the “enormous [administrative] burden” (Pospíšil, 2011) for the sake of all sides, the courts, however, retreated from directly participating in these proceedings. The bailiffs became fully responsible for their transparent execution. Neutralizing the media-covered abuse by rationalizing it as a repairable state regulatory failure, both tropes legitimize an actual increase of bailiffs’ market-based power over individualized debtors.

In outlining these depoliticizing origins, I also identify how the self-reliance rhetoric limits any pro-debtor reform shift even as the pro-creditor and -bailiff consensus unraveled during the mobilization against the governmental crisis management in the late 2000s. Because this individualizing rhetoric makes the mounting overindebtedness (Figure 1) invisible as a social problem, the leftist opposition challenged the center-right reforms within such limits as merely a 1990s-style regulatory return to “privatizing the execution of justice” (Jičínský, 2009). Through its austerity bias, the mostly low-income debtors are moreover rhetorically marginalized as an unrecognizable mass of either morally deceiving or economically irresponsible citizens. Pavel Blažek (2015), notorious for serving the creditor interests and bailiff power, could thus naturally denounce any pro-debtor change as “neither moral nor politically right, and not right legally either” from his position as both a Minister of Justice and an oppositional figure for the center-right ODS. Such depoliticizing origins and the parliamentary forces behind them are further understood as limiting repolitization.

Repolitization

Like the other ECE cases, the DEO politics shows how the missed opportunities for repolitization are rhetorically captured by the far-right SPD and the technocratic ANO. The pro-debtor rhetoric was politically mainstreamed in the 2013 parliamentary elections, although the NGOs and media made innovations to it for more than half a decade. This explains the belated collectivist reframing of the half-decade-long exponential rise of overindebtedness as a “social calamity” (Dienstbier, 2012) by the parliamentary left. The emergent sequence of pro-debtor consensus-building between the overlapping but competing rhetorics of social and popular justices, and its later NGO-inspired extension by the political legitimacy rhetoric are also understandable. During the ČSSD- and ANO-led common coalition governments, the bias in favor of law was thus challenged by justice. The far-right opposition propelled this shift most radically by progressing from a denouncement of a “big business with human misery” (Černoch, 2014) to demanding an “enforceable right to justice” (Okamura, 2019) for the debtors, and thus making them deserving of state protection. Such rhetoric fully enacted a pro-debtor reform direction only once the smaller centrist and center-right parties reappropriated the DEO reform process—despite the opposition of the leading center-right party ODS—while following the new rationalities of socio-economic stability and political legitimacy.

The repolitization originates as a rhetorical anti-agenda against the bailiffs’ powers. These are demasked as a privatized “state power” (Filip, 2015) which entraps the people or citizens in a “debt slavery” (Valachová, 2020). Through exposing this corporate abuse of public power as systemic exploitation, the state is demanded to directly reintervene to end the debt enforcement industry. Its semi-private model is delegitimized because the industry actually “infringes the law” by enslaving ordinary people in a vicious circle of unjustifiably high “fees, interest rates, and other procedural costs” (Fiedler, 2017). Even the far left then pays lip service to creditor interests because bailiffs fail to both “accommodate creditors and avoid bringing debtors to their knees” (Filip, 2015).

So far sacred, creditor interests and, in effect, the austerity imperative to repay all debts are thus denaturalized. Repoliticizing forces do not necessarily replace the so-far dominant debtfarist rhetoric and framework but relativize them. Just as the world is hardly clearly divided between “the decent [debtors] and the bad [creditors]” (Tejc, 2015), not all debts are equally rightful. Although taking on risky debts is irresponsible, the “terrible atrocities” (Chvojka, 2018) caused by the formerly unregulated subprime and predatory lenders in the debt enforcement-led chain of poverty industries question the ultimate protection of creditor interests. The creditors are thus divided into those with rightful interests and those “parasitic and unacceptable” (Bělobrádek, 2017) ones who are responsible for the overindebtedness emergency. Although the rightful creditors must be satisfied, all creditors are now expected to bear their business risk of being satisfied only partially. The relativization of bailiff and creditor welfare is then a step to recognizing debtor rights and wellbeing.

On the one hand, the repolitization translates thus into a positive agenda once the cross-parliamentary coalition starts to internally compete over making debtors into citizens or people deserving of state protection. With “almost a million people in debt traps” (Valachová, 2018) and this group reaching the “middle class or lower middle class” (Válková, 2020) due to the new Covid-19 crisis, the overindebtedness is fully articulated as an urgent socioeconomic crisis. This is also a contradictory high point of the NGO and media influence. The Map of Debt Enforcements is used by the far right to decry “whole families being impoverished” (Okamura, 2019). At the same time, the Map serves to rhetorically match the absent social justice in the most debt-struck regions with a “fundamentally higher distrust” (Dienstbier, 2018) in state institutions and higher voting against the political mainstream or for the far right. The center-right thus increasingly reappropriates the pro-debtor rhetoric because the “debts, debt traps, and unjust debt enforcements [. . . .] eroded the trust in the rule of law and the trust in our democracy” (Čižinský, 2019). The state must now intervene to give the entrapped citizens “a light at the end of the tunnel”(Farský, 2018b) for the sake of overall socioeconomic stability. Once the overindebtedness becomes a concern of political legitimacy not only for the center-left mainstream but also for center-right parties, openly pro-debtor DEO reforms become possible.

Limits

On the other hand, any repolitization is historically limited by the depoliticizing regulatory origins and power relations of debtfare states. By the end of the 2010s, the pro-debtor DEO reforms took effect by slowly reversing the overindebtedness (Figure 1). However, they remain constrained by the center-right opposition to this product of ‘media massaging supported by some NGOs’ (Bauer, 2018), and by the large creditor and bailiff “lobby” (Fiedler, 2017). More importantly, such limits are variedly self-imposed by the leading repolitization figures spanning the center-left (Valachová, 2020), the technocratic populists (Nacher, 2021b), and the center and center-right (Farský, 2018b; Ferjenčík, 2019; Výborný, 2018). These limits are rhetorically instrumentalized as selecting a new “middle” between the old “pro-creditor” and new “pro-debtor” consensuses (Nacher, 2021a). This documents how the repoliticizing coalitions tend toward making the debts work again through an ‘honest and fair’ (Valachová, 2020) debtfarism. The two flagship reform amendments to the DEO-centered framework—the debt relief for debtors, which won a parliamentary majority, and the territoriality of bailiffs, which failed to do so—illustrate this. More so than popular or even social justice, a re-enactment of socioeconomic stability in and the political legitimacy of the Czech neoliberal state and its manufacturing-led strategy-making became dominant rhetoric.

The debt relief showcases this sort of honest and fair debtfarism. The state must show its benevolence to the newly deserving debtors, yet reintegrate them only as productive, self-reliant citizens. Any such relief process is “not a proposal for debt amnesty” (Pelikán, 2018) but “rather [for] a personal bankruptcy” whereby the debtors are brought “back from the grey zone to the official zone” (Nacher, 2019) for the sake of socioeconomic stability. Two return paths are opened. The first is the ordinary insolvency-based one for rightful debts to public and private creditors which are partially forgiven within 3- or 5-year periods under the specific workfarist and austerity conditions detailed below.⁴ The second is the extraordinary one for negligent debts-turned-debt enforcement traps involving debts to municipalities or any public institutions and companies; these can be repaid in their original value but with an administrative fee for bailiffs. This “merciful” window of opportunity, however, remains open only temporarily to demonstrate that it is an exceptional “benevolence” of the state which proves the general rule that debts must be worked off (Výborný, 2021).

Restoring the political legitimacy through re-enacting socioeconomic stability, the insolvency-based relief is rhetorically narrowed as a trade-off between a benevolent but still effective state and the self-reliant debtors-citizens. Because the debtors are legally obliged to have or strive for gainful employment by the proceeding, the effectiveness trope is rearticulated. The debt relief becomes an effective proceeding to return them from an informal economy to a productive labor paying “taxes, and social and health insurance” (Farský, 2018a). Rather than keeping debtors “resigned to living on welfare,” it is more effective to thus make them “beneficial for the state” and the public budgets (Ferjenčík, 2019). To deserve state protection, the debtors must show their will to undergo this “educative” proceeding bringing them “back to standard habits” (Kněžínek, 2018) of working off their debts. Its conditions remind one of a hyperbolic “anathema [and] penury” (Farský, 2018b) which test their determination: After the debtor’s 3 or 5 years of “living in very impoverished conditions and fulfilling all necessities” (Výborný, 2018)—being deprived of all unnecessary ownership, finding gainful employment, and surviving on a legal living minimum income—to satisfy the creditors’ rightful interests, the public courts decide on the success of the debtor’s re-education.

Finally, the decade-long and unresolved conflict over the introduction of territoriality exposes how the efficiency trope legitimizes the interests and power of large creditors and bailiffs. The principle of regional territoriality does not reverse the privatized model altogether but changes the large semi-private, nationally operating bailiffs into small semi-public, regionally-based offices under court supervision in the debtor’s area of residence. According to its proponents, because the unrestricted “principles of competition” created monopolizing cartels of large creditors and bailiffs at the expense of debtors, the “clear rules” of territoriality (Šípová, 2020) break them. For its opponents among both pro-debtor and pro-creditor forces, the privatized model must be preserved as such rules deny an efficient debt enforcement environment. Arbitrarily differentiating between “the large bailiff—the mafioso, [and] the small one—the honest one” (Nacher, 2021b), such rules ignore the better market performance of the large ones. Moreover, territoriality is refused because it restrains the creditors’ free choice irrespective of whether the bailiffs are “competent or incompetent, collect justly or unjustly, make mistakes or not” (Benda, 2017). In sum, debt relief and territoriality explain the depoliticizing limits to the repolitization and how it co-produces debtfare states rather than abolishing them.

Conclusion

This article foregrounds the politics of the debtfare state in analyzing the contemporary repolitization of neoliberalism. The Czech DEO-centered politics documents how such a state strategy co-constitutes the financialized origins of this repolitization in ECE. This political struggle over changing its structural selectivity from a pro-creditor and -bailiff to a limited pro-debtor prioritization co-constitutes the overall repolitization of the ECE neoliberal state. Hence, the repolitization of debtfarism against low-income populations (Mikuš and Rodik, 2021) should be considered as much as the repolitization of a relatively robust yet highly selective welfarism for middle-classes (and capital) (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019; Stubbs and Lendvai-Bainton, 2020). Furthermore, the DEO-centered framework invites one to distinguish the ECE form of the debtfare state from the other global forms (Soederberg, 2014) but also recognize its diversity within this postsocialist semiperiphery. Enacted as a side-effect and then a market-oriented replacement of this selective welfarism, the ECE form is segregated into two segments. As the state regulation of a middle-class consumer and especially mortgage lending from large foreign-owned banks is researched (Bohle, 2014; Mikuš, 2019) in the first segment, the second segment of poverty industries for low-income populations should be further foregrounded (Hoření Samec, 2021). Here, the debt enforcement industry is foregrounded as distinguishing the Czech debtfare state from other regional and global forms.

Concerning these origins, the periodization of the Czech DEO-centered debtfare state strategy-making offers a historicizing interpretation of the ECE neoliberal state and its structural selectivity (Scheiring and Szombati, 2020; Shields, 2015; Šitera, 2021). For the 2000s, depolitization conveys how the leading forces produce debtfarist rhetoric to regulatorily enact the creditor-debtor-bailiff relations as a market-oriented co-constitution of the overall neoliberal state formation. For the (post-)crisis 2010s, repolitization allows one to conceive of how the rival forces challenge the debtfarist pro-creditor and -bailiff selectivity with a pro-debtor one when co-constituting a protective reorientation of this state formation. The repolitization and its depoliticizing limits should be traced in the—postsocialist and semiperipheral—international and national regulatory and power conditions which historically favor market-oriented over socially protective state selectivity.

Although documenting how the Czech “populists” (Scheiring, 2021) politically mainstreamed the pro-debtor shift, I suggest going beyond populism when interpreting any contemporary repolitization. Rather, I offer an analysis that explores complex and often contradictory coalitions of repoliticizing yet mutually competing forces. They also have overlapping but rival rhetorics of popular or social justices or political legitimacy. Then repolitization can be matched with both emancipatory (Roberts and Soederberg, 2014) and non-emancipatory (Mikuš, 2019) forces. Finally, it remains dependent on the concrete constellations of both civil society and political forces ranging from NGOs or social movements, media, and organized interests to political parties.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jan Daniel, Tomáš Hoření Samec, Clément Steuer, Lucie Trlifajová, Václav Walach, the three reviewers, and other colleagues from the IIR Critical Studies Seminar for their generous comments.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Daniel Šitera

Notes

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