At the end of last month, Gazprom suddenly announced, without warning, emergency technical maintenance of the Nord Stream 1 gas station, causing concern in many European countries. Sure enough, a few hours before the end of the 3-day maintenance period (on the evening of the 2nd), the Russian side closed the pipeline indefinitely on the pretext of "oil leakage". Originally, there were many social experts in EU countries who were "blowing the wind", convinced that Putin was just spreading fear of raising the price of natural gas, and they were now earning a lot of foreign exchange from Europe and would not cut off their own financial paths; But this time, Russia seems to have made up its mind to put punishment for Europe on the agenda.
After learning that Russia's supply of gas to the EU was hopeless, the rebound in European gas prices further broke the record. On the 3rd, more than 70,000 angry Czechs gathered in Wenceslas Square in the center of the capital Prague to denounce Prime Minister Fiala for betraying the interests of the country and ignoring the well-being of the people. They believe the Czech Republic could have avoided getting involved in the energy conflict, but now the government has angered Russia and is helpless against soaring energy prices. The demonstrators shouted their slogans: resignation of the prime minister, refusal of military aid to Ukraine, resumption of electrical energy contracts with Russia, and cessation of ukrainian refugees. The organizers of the demonstrations also warned that if the government did not seek change according to this trend, the Czech economy would be in a dead end before the winter!
On the 4th, Czech Prime Minister Fiala responded to the "10,000-person energy demonstration" incident. He did not apologize or give the people any explanation, political commitment, and his attitude was unusually tough; Fiala said the purpose of the march was "not in the czech national interest" and that the demonstrations were led by Russians or pro-Russians, organized by "pro-Russian people who have come to extremes", and the public was seduced based on the influence of Russia's bad propaganda and disinformation warfare. At the same time, the Czech prime minister's opposition party also took the opportunity to challenge him in parliament, but these people were also classified by him as "pro-Russian".
In summary, Fiala's way to solve this crisis is to always label "pro-Russian". But the real reason is that the inflation rate of the entire Czech Republic has risen to the highest in 30 years, and the people are facing "basic survival problems" while paying higher social costs, and even electricity and natural gas are difficult to buy. Now that the social functioning is in trouble, the number of people supporting Ukraine has dropped significantly, and more people want to protect themselves before talking about supporting democracy; Another reason is that there are not a few anti-EU people in the Czech Republic, due to historical reasons, their relations with Germany, the dominant country of the European Union, are not good, and they also have a "vendetta" with the Soviet Union, and Ukraine is an important member of the Soviet Union, and the people's good feelings for Ukraine are very limited.
It is also worth mentioning that after seeing what happened in the Czech capital, the German media began to worry about the next one. Germany is undoubtedly one of the countries with the highest demand for energy in all of Europe, and it also means that the crisis facing further energy prices is worse than that of other countries. Fortunately, the German people are more "restrained" at present, and the service industry unions and industrial enterprise unions only warn the government to "find a way to solve the price problem as soon as possible", otherwise they will use practical actions to put pressure on them. One commented: "It is only a matter of time before people go to the streets of Berlin, no later than before winter arrives, and Scholz may have prepared the same line as Fiala: this is all done by pro-Russians, it is all planned by Russians... Of course, other Germans can also shout these slogans to warm up and spend the winter. ”