No one will give me conditions before the meeting, says the ODS negotiator in Prague
Even a month after the elections, it is not clear who will lead the capital. Will negotiations for a new series of coalitions end TOGETHER and YES?
Guest I’m asking was the chairman of the Prague ODS and deputy Marek Benda.
Negotiations on the next municipal coalition in the capital are dragging on. It is not so clear whether the winning coalition Spolu will choose a political marriage copying the government format: i.e. with the Pirates and STAN, or whether it will head into the arms of ANO.
TOGETHER negotiators assure that the priority is to create a coalition on the floorplan of the team currently occupying Strak’s Academy. But at the same time, the candidate for mayor Bohuslav Svoboda and the leader of SPOLU praises how constructive the negotiations are with Patrik Nacher, the leader of the Prague ANO candidate.
In any case, the constituent meeting of the newly elected Prague council is fast approaching. According to the law, it should take place at the beginning of next week, if it is not postponed a little against the election result, which must be decided by the court. The negotiators of the individual parties are therefore considering that urgent matters will be resolved in the council, instead of a new coalition, by work teams. They would seek agreement across the political spectrum.
The possible next mayor, Bohuslav Svoboda, sent the current one a letter in which he asks him not to make any major decisions. In this, the ODS agrees with the ANO representatives. However, Zdeněk Hřib from the Pirate Party replied that until a new council of the capital city is established, all competences remain with the current leadership of the metropolis.
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What was said in the conversation?
0:40 Where does the meeting in Prague matter the most? – I never thought that negotiating Prague would be easy. It is too complex a mechanism with many, many interests. And in addition, I have the feeling that Mr. Hřib, in particular, is taking longer to come to terms with the fact that he will not be mayor. I think that the real problem lies in him, the conditions imposed are artificial, fake for me, when they do not apply elsewhere in the republic. On the one hand, they say, we have nothing against Mr. Wolfoni, but we have some principles. – And don’t they? They declared before the elections that they did not want to sit in the council with a criminally prosecuted person. – They also declared that I don’t want to sit in the council with the YES movement, so all that remains is to honestly say, we have no partner with whom we could join the government and we are leaving for the opposition.
2:00 So it’s a false condition for you? – I think it’s a false condition. For example, in the Liberec region, they sit with Governor Půta, who is indicted, and they don’t find it strange. – Do you personally mind? – It really doesn’t bother me, because I experienced 8 years of criminal prosecution, indicted Bohuslav Svoboda also for voting in the council, which now recently ended with the statement that the act did not happen.
3:30 am Guilt and punishment are decided only by the court. – And Jan Wolf will go there, is this a good signal for the public? – I think that Jan Wolf is innocent. – He is the same prosecuted person as Andrej Babiš, did it bother you and not Jan Wolf? – As for collective voting, we should be much more sensitive to the presumption of innocence. The prime minister of the republic decides, for example, who will be the supreme prosecutor, there the conflict of interests in terms of authority is much higher than that of a councilor who is accused of having voted for some subsidy that was presented to him.
6:30 am This is not an accusation that he stole something, he hurt someone, killed someone. It is an allegation that he voted in the body. I am sensitive to that, I consider such accusations questionable. only none of those cases were followed through. After the Parkanová and Svoboda cases, I am simply sensitive to it.
8:10 a.m We have clearly said, we do not want any a priori conditions. A week before the elections, I gave an interview to Právo a Novinek, where I said that I consider it reasonable that the next coalition in Prague be based on the current government coalition. And then on Monday, Zdeněk Hřib will make a post on the social network, where he will say that 6 out of 10 candidates from the ODS and the TOGETHER coalition are unacceptable to him for some reason. After the meeting, they go out in front of the journalists and draw it only on Jan Wolf. And they are surprised that I say that of course I insist on Jan Wolf. It is a condition that no one will give me before we go to the meeting.
10:00 a.m. Now you are one with Praha Sobě, is this an option for wider cooperation at the municipality? – We talked about the program, about what the ideas would be. For example, Prague has not told itself any a priori condition for the formation of the next council, and we will look for programmatic and personnel intersections. Those negotiations with the Pirates have stalled for me on the margin, but a margin that I refuse to be dictated to. And since the negotiations with the Pirates are a bit blocked, I try to look for other ways.
11:00 a.m. Are these also paths towards YES? – I think that’s unlikely. We sat in the opposition in the council for 4 years, we have similar opinions on the functioning and non-functioning of the city, where things in Prague should be improved and controlled. The program intersection exists there. In the end, however, we are dealing with how the opposition should behave towards the coalition, and that is the conversation it is having with ANEM. Even the opposition must have sufficient control mechanisms. – So a coalition with the YES movement is unlikely at this point? – It’s unlikely at this point, but I’m a politician, so I say it’s not out of the question.
1:30 p.m Our views on how to function in Prague are quite different between us and the Pirates, on the other hand, in Prague ANO acts as a pure representative of such a post-social-democratic left, so those differences certainly exist with both entities.
14:10 In September, you said that ANO, or rather Andrej Babiš, is destroying the politics he learned from President Miloš Zeman, other representatives of ANO are not doing otherwise, is Patrik Nacher an exception? – Nationally, and we saw it in the municipal and senate elections, it was destruction. Patrik Nacher certainly does not belong to the most militant members of the ANO movement in the Chamber of Deputies in which I sit with him.
16:00 You are also one of the MPs who signed the proposal to legalize marriage as a union of a man and a woman in the constitution. Considering the current case that happened in Bratislava, when two members of the LGBT community were shot, should politicians in the Czech Republic more openly reject hatred towards the LGBT community? – I hardly dare to judge Slovakia, that person apparently planned the murders of Jews and others, that person hated the whole world. I think that hatred towards any minority or majority is a crime and should not be tolerated. But we should be solving real problems. – Are the problems of the LGBT community not real? – Do we feel that these are real problems in the Czech Republic? In the Czech Republic, where has the Prague Pride march been held for 10 years? Where is the serious debate about whether marriage should be for everyone?
I’m asking
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