The Czech ruling coalition has passed a parliamentary resolution against the upcoming Sudetengerman summit to commemorate the German minority violently expelled from the former Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of World War II.

The resolution tabled by the far right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) has already strained ties with the country’s largest trading partner Germany, and also ignited hostile comments between Czech cabinet members and the the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

“The parliament expresses disagreement with holding the 76th summit of the Sudetengerman expat association on the territory of the Czech Republic considering the historical context and that in this environment stances casting doubt on the postwar settlement appear on a long term basis,” the resolution states.

The summit is scheduled for May 22-25 in the country’s second largest city Brno, where some of the most violent atrocities against German population took place in May 1945, including the forced march of Brno's large German population out of the city towards the border with Austria.  

Organisers of the summit, which is to take place during the Meeting Brno cultural festival, vowed to proceed, noting that politicians from Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’ senior ruling ANO party previously backed the summit, while Czech artists, Holocaust survivors and human rights activists praised the summit as reconciliatory.   

Estimates of Germans killed, including women and children, during the post-WWII violent expulsion from Czechoslovakia vary from tens of thousands up to a quarter of a million, and followed the 1939-1945 Nazi Germany-imposed rule on the Bohemian and Moravian parts of the country.

During the parliamentary session, Minister of Sport Boris Šťastný of the anti-green and eurosceptic Motorists for Themselves party called the summit “a political provocation”, claiming that the Bavarian umbrella organisation of expelled Germans, the Sudetengerman landsmanshaft, “is balancing on the edge”.

“It is an event, which opens old wounds,” ANO MP Taťána Malá was quoted as saying by Czech Television, while SPD MP Miroslav Ševčík called the supporters of the summit “traitors”.

Czech opposition MPs announced they would not take part in the parliamentary session, which, however, did not prevent the ruling coalition from adopting the unprecedented resolution. A minimum of 67 MPs is needed for a valid parliamentary session, while the populist coalition led by Babiš has a comfortable majority of 108 in the parliament of 200.

Babiš joined forces with the SPD and Motorists to form the most right wing cabinet in Prague since WWII after ANO’s victory in the October general election. This followed the party’s turn to national conservative waters during Babiš’ unsuccessful bid for president in 2023, while in 2024 ANO became one of the founding parties of the Patriots for Europe grouping in the European Parliament.  

SPD leader and chairman of the parliament Tomio Okamura tabled a parliamentary motion against the summit last week, and described the summit as “a rough insult of all the victims of the horrendous German occupation of Czech lands and of all the brave fighters against it”, arguing that Germans violently expelled from the country after World War II are “attempting a revision of WWII results”.

However, Okamura also sparked a backlash from fellow far-right party, the AfD in Germany.

“The goal of Sudetengermans and my great wish and my goal is for Czechia to simply acknowledge the injustice and suffering of the expulsion. It does not cost anything, but it is a very important contribution to the reconciliation of our nations,” AfD MP Martina Kempf was quoted as saying by the Czech Press Agency.  

Okamura attacked Sudetengermans on his Facebook page last week during the commemorations of the Prague 1945 uprising against the retreating Nazi Germany forces, which the Kremlin-sympathising radical politician also used to declare that the “occupation of our country by Germany is completely incomparable with the occupation of our country by the Soviet Union in 1968”.

Soviet-led armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to crush the country’s liberal reforms, which the Soviet leaders feared could divert Czechoslovakia from Moscow’s orbit, and helped impose a normalisation era regime in the 1970s and 1980s, which was brought down by the Velvet Revolution in November 1989.

“Germans have tried to annihilate us,” says the headline of an image shared on Okamura’s Facebook post.

The image Okamura shared refers to Czech Germans by the derogatory term “sudeťáci”, reinvigorating the anti-German hatred which in the aftermath of WWII led to mass killings of Czech Germans, including women and children, in the bloody retribution for the Nazi-imposed 1939-45 rule in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which oversaw the ruthless suppression of Czech dissent, including the razing of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky.

The Nazi-imposed rule served as pretext giving postwar Czech nationalists a free pass for looting, rape and widespread violence in the aftermath of WWII. Germans were by far the largest minority in the multiethnic pre-war Czechoslovakia.