By Anton Verma

By the time the pipe burst and flooded the brewery-turned-TV studio with fifty litres of vintage lager, President Ivan Hrdlička had already decided he didn’t care anymore.

He was wet from the knees down, standing in a puddle of Pilsner as cameras kept rolling, steam from the hot stage lights mixing with the scent of decades-old yeast. His challenger, a slick ex-banker named Radek Vysloužil, looked off-stage, aghast. The moderators shuffled their papers like they might absorb the liquid. But Hrdlička? He just took off his shoes, rolled up his trousers, and spoke into the mic like a man seeking absolution who confesses to a lamppost.

“I didn’t get into politics to help anyone,” he said. “I got in because I thought I could get rich without needing any discernible skills. Spoiler: I was right.”

The audience tittered nervously. At home, millions of Czechs leaned forward.

After the 2027 referendum to ‘make a sole individual finally responsible for this mess,’ the presidency now came with real teeth—and no instruction manual. It didn’t help Hrdlička’s pre-existing conditions: chronic avoidance of personal responsibility and the attention to detail of a drunk juggler at a porcupine convention. He hadn’t read the fine print, or the big print, and within months, the weight had begun to rot him from the inside out.

“We call ourselves the Civic Renewal Front. At the last retreat, we needed three translators, two ambulances, and a goat. Don’t ask.”

The goat bit was also true, unfortunately. Someone had brought it to symbolise fiscal discipline. It had eaten the minutes of the health subcommittee.

“The EU? Kafka in a wine bar,” he went on. “You arrive. You wait. No one knows the plot. Then a German recites the rules—freshly minted that morning. It’s kabuki theatre for cretins.”

He looked at Vysloužil, who was trying to contain his glee. “Look at Vysloužil. He figures he’s won the election now. He’s right, of course. He’s also a total philanderer who cheats on his wife with not one but two mistresses and even a boyfriend.”

Vysloužil’s subtle smile evaporated like a politician’s promise after election day.

“I read the intelligence reports, Radek. But you know what? I hope you do win. Everyone who’s wasting a perfectly good evening watching this farce should know that Vysloužil is a lying scum but I make him look like Jan Hus. I’d not only vote for him over me, I’ve decided I will in fact do just that and encourage one and all to vote for the lesser of two assholes.”

By the ten-minute mark, the entire studio was silent but for the sound of Hrdlička’s voice and the distant gurgling of the fermentation pipes.

“I used to have a wife. Then I had a mistress. Yes, Vysloužil, I’ve been there too. But now I just have a minibar and a VPN.”

He pulled out an old campaign brochure and scribbled over the party slogan with a black marker. He held it up: At Least I’m Not Lying To You Anymore. Or Myself.

The meltdown went viral before the credits even rolled.

The next day, the Civic Renewal Front disendorsed him. “A regrettable display of fatigue,” read the official statement. His ex-wife gave an interview to Czech Cosmopolitan claiming he’d once wept during a Škoda commercial. A psychologist diagnosed him over the radio as having “post-democratic deflation disorder.”

Then the numbers came in.

He was up eight points.

YouTubers remixed his monologue into techno anthems. T-shirts with Roll Up the Trousers! sold out in hours. One local brewery renamed its IPA Hrdlička’s Honesty.

And the president, baffled but emboldened, began to lean into the spiral.

“You want transparency?” he told the press, as if he were on the verge of laughing hysterically, weeping profusely—or maybe doing both at the same time. “Fine. I’m in debt to four oligarchs. I only passed one economics subject in uni. And I once signed a treaty without reading it because I thought it was a menu.”

He then pulled out his phone and showed a photo of a stool he had excreted the previous night.

“This,” he said, “is more coherent than our energy policy.”

The photo—labelled Bobík—took on a life of its own. Artists rendered it in oils and pixels. Activists printed it on placards and hashtagged it to infinity and beyond. The campaign, now run by a fired intern and a drunk mime, adopted it as the official mascot. Bobík for President! the signs read. Below, a smear of brown against a Czech tricolour.

His rallies became absurdist cabarets, open-air madhouses for anyone who had looked at the world at large and decided if that was sanity then they chose crazy. A man in a giant liver costume opened each event by spinning slowly to Strauss. A scrappy stray dog who kept invading press conferences was officially adopted, named Masaryk, and became the nation’s First Dog.

At a summit in Brussels, Masaryk urinated on a Slovenian diplomat. The Slovenian apologised.

Polls surged. Opposition parties collapsed into buzzword salads. Vysloužil took to quoting leadership psychology guides (as well as almost fanatically having himself photographed in the company of beautiful women), while Hrdlička announced he would rename the Ministry of Defence to the Ministry of Emotional Security.

“If elected,” he declared, “I will abolish all ministries one day a week. Democracy needs a coffee break.”

On election day, he was filmed by an army of news crews officially casting his vote for Vysloužil.

On election night, the result was a landslide in his favour. (Vysloužil only won the Vinohrady district—the pink vote nudging him over the line there, albeit barely.)

Exit polls showed the public had voted for the President’s re-election because:

  • “He’s awful, but at least he admits it.”
  • “He reminds me of my uncle after his divorce. I trust that.”
  • “Politics is a sewer and the crap quite rightly rises to the top.”
  • “Bobík speaks for me.”

He stood on the castle balcony, Masaryk curled under one arm, a glass of slivovice in the other. Below him, the crowd was manic. Foam hands. Dog masks. Dozens of life-sized cutouts of Bobík, laminated and reverent.

One man held his above his head like a saint’s relic, tears streaming down his face. A woman next to him had Bobík Lives! written across her chest in lipstick.

My bowel movement has become an actual movement, Hrdlička thought.

And then, disturbingly, he realised he was actually happy.

For the first time in decades, he was enjoying himself. Not performing. Not managing. Not surviving.

He was simply living.

And he knew, right then and there, what he would do.

I will govern every day as if I am trying to end my presidency by sundown.

He would leak everything—especially the most embarrassing titbits. He would appoint five-year-olds to economic portfolios (they could hardly do worse), and rewrite tax law in limericks (the cruder the better, as far more appropriate for the subject at hand). He would host summits in bathhouses. Broadcast cabinet meetings from saunas. Rename the treasury after his childhood pet parrot.

He would govern like a saboteur, not sabotage like a governor.

Because maybe in today’s world with everything beta-tested into a slow, joyless, hollowed-out death-in-life, that was the only meaningful way to now run a country, or a post-country construct, or whatever the hell Czechia had become.

Try to ruin it—openly and honestly.

(It was either that or lobotomies all around—because clearly, faux-sincerity and round-the-clock appeasement were poison. Only deliberate farce had a hope of cleansing the system and flushing out the true shits clogging its pipes: a manifesto of madness as a nationwide suppository.)

He looked down at the people, at the signs and the slogans and the blessed turd that had led him to this moment, then took a sip of slivovice, exhaled, and smiled.

For the first time ever as a paid-up, card-carrying servant of the public, he meant it.

He’d sleep well tonight, and rise early for the first order of business: appointing Masaryk as the new Chief of the General Staff of the Army and seeing whom the new literal top dog of the military would declare war against first.

Maybe the nation’s cats?

Or postmen?

(Whomever the designated enemy was to be, it was a problem for tomorrow.)

As he headed to the presidential bedchamber, he knew two things without a doubt: that Masaryk had just pissed on his arm—and that he’d finally passed something useful.

© Anton Verma, 2025