For practically the entire period of Klaus’s second government and the period of the bureaucratic government, i.e. between 1996 and 1998, Miloš Zeman was the dominant opposition leader. The times played into his rhetoric: Klaus’s government was very unpopular, and from the beginning of 1997 there was one affair of the main ruling party (ODS) after another. Therefore, Zeman, the chairman of the ČSSD and then speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, did not have to do anything major to increase his popularity. He always just looked at the relevant situation, which smelled of corruption, in the style that under the CSSD government such things would not happen and all the shenanigans of the 1990s would be thoroughly investigated and that not a single tunneler and corrupt person would remain unpunished.
As tensions in society grew and he was disgusted by new and new cases, Zeman gradually began to specify what anti-corruption tools would be deployed under his government, who would investigate real and alleged crimes, and how many thousands of tunnelers would go behind bars. As a marketing shorthand for cleaning up the state apparatus of corrupt practices, the ČSSD machine began using the name Clean Hands. The term was then familiar from Italy, where the same action had succeeded in cleaning the local public administration of corruption and links to mafia structures over the past few years.
