When a Political Party Starts Behaving Like a Cult

I have a friend who spent years in a Czech political party. He built it, believed in it, sacrificed his weekends, his nights, and a piece of his family life for it. Then he left. Or rather — he was pushed out. And in the letter he wrote to his party colleagues as a farewell, he used one very precise word: closed group.

He wasn’t writing about religion. He wasn’t writing about a charismatic guru in white robes. He was writing about patterns of behaviour that anyone who has ever read anything about group psychology will recognise. And which, if you have ever sat through a party meeting, are uncomfortably familiar.

This is about those patterns.

What a cult actually is

People usually associate the word cult with a crowd mumbling something incomprehensible in robes, or with a community devoutly waiting for a UFO to arrive. That’s a shame, because in doing so they deprive themselves of a very precise analytical tool.

A cult — in the psychological, not the religious sense — is a group that systematically closes off its own thinking. A group that begins to protect its own identity more than reality. And one that does so using specific, repeatable and recognisable mechanisms.

These mechanisms were described by American psychiatrist Robert Lifton in 1961, based on his study of Chinese re-education camps. They were later adapted by Steven Hassan for modern authoritarian groups. What is striking is that these patterns no longer appear only in religious movements. They appear wherever a group is sufficiently closed, where leaving is treated as betrayal, and where loyalty is placed above truth.

Today’s political parties are, in fact, perfectly suited to these patterns. And the Czech political scene over the past ten years offers an almost exclusive body of study material from which more than one article could be written.

First pattern: the world is black and white

Every closed group needs an enemy. At first, the enemy is outside — opponents, the media, a corrupt system. That is understandable and, to a degree, healthy. The problem arises the moment the boundary between “us and them” shifts inward.

Whoever begins to doubt gets a label. “Bitter.” “A sore loser.” “Doesn’t understand the situation.” That person is elegantly removed from the debate without anyone needing to address the substance of their criticism. Because once a critic is framed as a somewhat pathetic personality case, there is no need to engage with what they are actually saying.

This is precisely the mechanism described by Ondřej Chrást, a former Pirate Party deputy minister of culture, in a text he wrote to his party colleagues just before leaving. I have known Ondra for years — from the time when both of us, within the Pirate environment, believed this was going to be “the” different party. And his analysis is, after all this time, unexpectedly precise: the moment a party can no longer deal with internal criticism except by discrediting it, it has ceased to be a party. It has become a tribe. Unfortunately somewhere around the Neolithic.

Second pattern: loyalty as a moral category

“Now is not the time.” “Don’t rock the boat before the election.” “It’s not fair to your colleagues.”

These sentences, in various forms, have been heard by everyone who has ever tried to name a problem from within any closing group. And they are brilliant in how they work: they elevate loyalty from a means to an end. What was once a value that helped the group function becomes a value that prevents the group itself from correcting anything.

Because the right time for criticism never comes. Before elections it’s off-limits, after elections everyone consolidates, then the next campaign begins to take shape. And the cycle closes.

The analytical research I commissioned for this article, mapping the Czech political scene between 2013 and 2025, describes this mechanism as one of the most consistent patterns across parties of very different political persuasions. It is party discipline elevated to a value in its own right, and statutes that enforce that discipline by concentrating power with the chairman — without formally offending anyone.

Czech legislation pays only marginal attention to intra-party democracy. The Constitutional Court itself has stated that the legal framework in this area is wholly inadequate. That is not an accident. It is convenient for everyone who wants to bring order to their party on their own terms. And it is precisely what drives political systems in general toward the oligarchisation of power and toward authoritarianism, even within formerly democratic parties and movements.

Third pattern: the spiral of silence

This is the most sophisticated of all the mechanisms described here, because no one organises it. It emerges on its own.

People quietly agree in private, but remain silent in public. Twenty people agree, but each assumes they are alone in agreeing — because no one else is saying anything. An illusion of consensus forms, one that does not actually exist. And from this illusion, the legitimacy of decisions is derived — decisions that have no genuine support behind them.

Social psychologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described this phenomenon as the spiral of silence: the more people stay silent, the more others believe the consensus is real, and the more additional people stay silent. Once set in motion, the spiral is very difficult to stop.

In politics, this looks like a vote that passes unanimously or near-unanimously, and three weeks later you discover in the corridors that half of those present held a different view. They raised their hand anyway. Or they didn’t raise it against. In this context, the two are the same thing.

Fourth pattern: the centre and its guardians

Formally, the structures exist. Committees, presidiums, national forums. On paper they vote, decide, and oversee.

In practice, within a closing group, there is another layer: a tight circle around the leader who makes the real decisions about everything that happens. The formal bodies ratify. This circle is not necessarily formalised — it may be a network of friends, a group of advisors with no clear mandate, people who have access to the leader and are able to steer which information reaches him and in what frame.

In this arrangement, dissent is not substantive disagreement — it is “obstruction.” Discussion is not a democratic mechanism — it is “inefficiency.” And whoever tries to resolve things through the official channels finds that those channels have quietly stopped working, without anyone formally having abolished them.

The Pirate Party, which I know best from personal experience — I was a member too, and I left in very much the same way as Ondřej, though earlier — is in this respect a paradoxically instructive example. A party that built its identity on transparency and direct democracy — it has a national forum, public votes, open discussion — and which nonetheless managed to develop this very pattern.

The form remained, the substance hollowed out. Chrást described it as a situation where “the bodies are so weakened, their options so constrained, that meaningful change seems impossible.” And it would be unfair to call the Pirates a case of organised authoritarianism — not yet. But the mechanisms of a closing group find their way even where no one deliberately held the door open for them.

“It is not cults but tolerance that will save us.” — Eduard Goldstücker

Fifth pattern: defeat gets rewritten

In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger studied a group that believed the end of the world would arrive on a specific date. The date came and went without apocalypse. What happened? The group did not disintegrate. It strengthened. It rewrote the events so that they confirmed the group’s identity rather than disproving it.

In politics this looks like an electoral collapse communicated as “we held on.” A scandal framed as “an attack by hostile media.” The departure of key people dismissed as “natural turnover” — or immediately discredited: “Another bitter one who can’t handle losing.”

And yet it is precisely that sentence — the ready-made narrative for anyone who leaves, prepared before they have even gone — that is perhaps the clearest diagnostic sign. Because if a group has a template for everyone who departs before they have actually departed, it has no need to examine the reasons. And in doing so it loses the only feedback loop that could ever correct it.

What ten years of Czech politics tell us

Ondřej’s case prompted me to do something I had been putting off for a long time. I set out to compile a systematic analytical review of the Czech political environment over the past decade. Not as an indictment, but as a map. I wanted to know whether these patterns are truly systemic, or merely the result of a bad mood among a few departing politicians.

The findings were uncomfortably unambiguous.

ANO and SPD are, in this respect, textbook cases — and surprisingly similar, despite having almost nothing in common ideologically. ANO operates as what political scientist Lubomír Kopeček calls a business-firm party: power is entirely centralised around the founder, regional structures have a purely service function, and decisions on admitting or expelling members are taken by the presidium, with no right of appeal.

Kopeček captured the entire model in the title of one of his studies: “I’m Paying, So I Decide.” Hana Greplová, who left in 2013 as one of five departing presidium members, confirmed it in plain terms: during her time in the movement, there was no question of democracy.

SPD goes further still — in 2019, the presidium dissolved the Moravian-Silesian regional club after its leader announced he would run against Okamura for party chairman. Reporters from Czech Television then published recordings in which the regional leadership instructed members to contribute to discussions on news websites. One of those recordings contained a sentence that speaks for itself: “You will operate in the interests of SPD Tomio Okamura. You will not organise in any behind-the-scenes groups.”

Trikolóra reproduced these patterns in time-lapse: formation, rapid growth, internal conflicts over candidate lists drawn up without the knowledge of members, mass departures, collapse. In 2021, more than twenty people left from the Hradec Králové region alone, issuing a statement that the leadership was “legitimising its operation without the necessary contribution of the membership base.” The Plzeň region lost eleven of its thirteen regional council members including the chairman — the presidium promptly dissolved the regional organisation. This is the mechanism the research describes as consistent across different parties: internal opposition does not end in reform. It ends in departure, or in the liquidation of the structure from which it emerged.

The Pirates represent a special case in this comparison. They started at the opposite pole — a public forum, internal voting accessible to all members, transparency as a programmatic commitment. And it was precisely that hyper-transparency that led to a chronic inability to move in any single direction. The party failed to deliver on what it had promised voters, because every decision was immediately challenged by another round of internal debate.

The electoral collapse in the 2024 regional elections — from ninety-nine regional councillors to three — was the result of this prolonged paralysis. But then came what Ondra describes from his own direct experience: a party unable to govern its public space begins to govern the people inside it. Whoever challenged the leadership got a label. Whoever left had a template waiting. Whoever asked questions was “a problem.” The form of transparency remained, the substance hollowed out — and the mechanisms of a closed group found their way in even where no one had deliberately opened the door.

Motoristé sobě remain, in this overview, an open question. A party personified by two faces, built quickly, with a voter base that identifies more with specific individuals than with any programme. The internal vote in January 2025, in which eighty-six percent of members backed the party leadership against coalition, may represent genuine consensus — or it may be a spiral of silence waiting for its moment. We don’t know. But we do know how things tend to look in similar constellations three or four years down the line.

The key conclusion of the analysis, however, is not about any specific party. It is about structure: the more a party is built around a single person who is also its financier or media face, the faster it closes. Size is irrelevant. Ideology is irrelevant. What matters is who pays — and who therefore decides.

Why this is especially dangerous for young people

Closed groups are highly effective at recruiting new members. They offer precisely what young people hunger for: a community with a sense of purpose, the feeling that you are fighting for something that matters, and an identity that places you somewhere.

And for exactly that reason, they are most dangerous to those who join them with genuine conviction. Because the mechanisms of a group closing around itself only reveal themselves over time — and by then you have invested years of your life, relationships, and a piece of yourself.

Ondřej Chrást describes how he arrived in 2017 full of energy and ideals, how he built party structures through nights and weekends, how he believed. And then watched, step by step, as the very patterns he had begun to recognise in the academic literature were quietly installed. And how hard it is to leave when you have put eight years of your life into something.

This is not a personal charge against any specific party. It is a description of how group psychology operates independently of ideology. It makes no difference whether a party represents the right, the left or the centre. It makes no difference whether it speaks of freedom or solidarity. The mechanisms are the same.

Is there a way out?

Groups do break free from closure. But usually only when the losses become large enough to overcome the mechanism of denial.

In politics, that means an electoral catastrophe, a scandal that cannot be rewritten, or the departure of so many people at once that the illusion of unity becomes unsustainable. The Pirates experienced precisely such a moment from 2024 onwards — a debacle in the European elections, then in the regional elections, the collapse of the leadership, departures of experts. Part of the party openly debated whether the forum’s transparency had perhaps been excessive, and whether it might be better to close it off. The paradox was perfect: a party that had built its identity on openness was considering closure at precisely the moment it needed the opposite.

Structural renewal is always possible. But it requires people willing to name the patterns precisely — not as a “communication problem” or “natural tension,” but as a form of group pathology that has an academic literature and well-documented paths out of it.

And it requires voters who learn to recognise these patterns. Not in order to brand parties with the label of cult — that word is too strong and too imprecise. But to learn to ask: who in this party is allowed to disagree? What happens to someone who leaves? Has this group ever admitted it was wrong?

The answers to those three questions will tell you more than any electoral programme.

Have you encountered these patterns in an environment you know? It doesn’t have to be politics — share your experience in the comments.

When a Political Party Starts Behaving Like a Cult

The following list connects specific documented cases and mechanisms to the eight patterns of cult-like behaviour described in the article. Each source is tagged with the number of the pattern it illustrates.

Patterns for reference:

1. Black-and-white worldview — whoever doubts is moved into the category of enemy
2. Loyalty as the highest value — party unity above truth
3. The spiral of silence — agreement in private, silence in public
4. A charismatic centre with its circle of guardians — formal bodies ratify, the real decisions are made by a tight inner circle
5. Discrediting instead of arguing — the critic is not refuted, they are labelled
6. Reinterpreting failure as success — defeat gets rewritten as victory
7. Control of information — what may be said publicly and what may not
8. A ready-made narrative for every departing member — the template exists before they have even left