Post-election negotiations in Prague 5: Fears of a tight coalition. Will the earthquake come, or will pragmatic judgment prevail?
photo: Jakub Mračno, PrahaIN.cz/Monika Shaw Salajová will try to win the post of mayor of Prague 5 in the post-autumn municipal elections.
Prague 5 Pirates are the tip of the scales. The winning group Praha 5 Sóbě won by an extremely narrow margin over the paper-strongest grouping TOGETHER (ODS+TOP09), moreover, their leader, mayor Renáta Zajíčková (ODS), ended up in 5th place in the number of votes. However, the nascent possible coalition of winners with the Pirates and the SEN21 movement has suffered from instability from the beginning.
The elections to the local council of Prague 5 brought the narrowest victory for local political newcomers: Prague 5 won ten mandates. The situation is the same with the second coalition SPOLEČNÁ, which is made up of experienced matadors from ODS and TOP09.
The narrowest majority of the looming coalition Praha 5 Sobě, Pirátů and SEN21, however, carries great risks: “21 mandates is the minimum narrow majority, and governing with this composition would mean being in a permanent state of war,” says Štěpán Rattay, a member of the negotiating team for the Pirates and newly elected representative.
The truth is that against the fresh politicians from Prague 5 Sobá, who are promising to dominate the municipal elections, are experienced matadors such as Petr Lachnita (ANO) or former mayor Renáta Zajíčková (ODS), who previously commented on the election results for the PrahaIN.cz server by the fact that it is a de facto draw.
And if they took experience into account, then we can really talk about a draw: a narrow majority means that if someone falls ill or is absent before an important vote, the meetings of not only the local representatives will become practically blocked, because the opposition will have a very simple position to prevent the decision in any way , but practically also to block negotiations at their beginning, for example by not approving the program.
In the last election period, the Pirates were newcomers to municipal politics, but this is no longer the case.
“A good election result is a promise for the creation of a majority coalition in which we will promote our electoral program. We met with the two strongest entities to find out to what extent we are able to achieve our goals. A coalition with new parties usually has 1 vote, and we proposed partners, considered the possibilities of its expansion. For now, we are assessing the program priorities of the individual parties and the related actions. So far, we have not discussed specific names for the management of the town hall,” comments the situation of the negotiations of the leader of the Pirates, Milan Kryl.
And the head of the TOGETHER negotiation team Lukáš Herold from the ODS does not rule out cooperation either, who told PrahaIN.cz: “We have not made any specific offer, but the Pirates are a democratic party, and I don’t know why we shouldn’t talk to them.”
The joy of the expected mayor Monika Shaw-Salajová may thus turn out to be premature: the fragility of the barrel is also exacerbated by the senatorial engagement of Václav Láska, who as the main personality of the SEN21 association initially completes the planned coalition.
Post-election mathematics will therefore be very complicated on Pětka, but with the current setup, the result may be an unstable situation. And experienced political matadors will always have a positive attitude towards newcomers, if only because they are aware of the basic premise: it is one thing to form a municipal council at all costs, another is to keep it for four years.
In addition, the victory of the Praha 5 Sobě group was not so convincing. In the second SPOLECNA, they had only 0.05 percent, a total of 526 votes. And that’s really not a lot in the fifth largest district of Prague with 89,000 inhabitants.