Czech Republic: Assessment of coexistence with Romani people improves for third year in a row
Coexistence between Romani people and other inhabitants of the Czech Republic is perceived by 78 % of the “majority society” in that country as “poor”, but almost 20 % of respondents to a June survey conducted by the Center for Public Opinion Research (CVVM) assessed coexistence as “good”. This is the third year in a row that positive assessments of coexistence have increased and negative perspectives have lost ground.
Last year a total of 83 % of respondents viewed coexistence between non-Romani and Romani people as “poor”, with just 14 % perceiving it as “good”. This June, half of respondents called coexistence “somewhat poor”, while another 28 % assessed it as “very poor”.
Most respondents with positive perceptions ranked coexistence as “somewhat good”. According to the CVVM, this year’s survey has confirmed a trend that began during the past two years.
“From the decline in positive perceptions to an historic low (and the achievement of an historic high in negative perceptions) in 2013, the assessment of coexistence is now achieving levels more like the previous decade,” the authors of the poll say. In 2013, 87 % of respondents viewed coexistence as “poor” and only 9 % viewed it as “good”.
When comparing what options Romani people have with the situation of non-Romani inhabitants, most respondents say they see that Romani people have a worse situation with employment. “When it comes to other areas of life that our research focused on, the numbers of people who consider the Romani population’s options to be worse than everybody else’s do not exceed the numbers of those who believe Romani people enjoy the same or even better options,” the CVVM reports.
When it comes to accessing housing, 22 % of respondents said they believe Romani people’s options are worse than non-Romani people’s options, but 49 % of respondents said they believe Romani people have even better options in this area than the “majority population” does. One-third of respondents said they consider the Government’s approach to the issue of the Romani minority to be satisfactory, while 54 % perceive it as unsatisfactory.
For the fourth year in a row a positive perspective on that question has gained ground, but it has not yet achieved the numbers of 2010, when 38 % of respondents assessed the Government’s handling of the issue of the Romani minority as satisfactory. The assessment of how local governments are addressing the issue of the Romani minority is somewhat more favorable, with 36 % of respondents seeing their approaches as satisfactory compared to 39 % who called them unsatisfactory.
“Compared to last year, the resulting distribution of opinions has not moved significantly, and we can say that basically it has been more or less stable since 2011,” the authors of the poll said. CVVM asked more than 1 000 people age 15 and older questions about Romani people and coexistence between 3 and 20 June 2016.
