Petr Hlaváček described the behind-the-scenes negotiations on the new leadership of Prague
Eleven weeks after the municipal elections, the capital has no new leadership. The longest coalition meeting in the history of the Czech Republic, between the SPOLU coalition, the Pirates and the STAN movement, did not bear any fruit, and after the last meeting of the SPOLU candidates, Bohuslav Svoboda announced to the media that he would seek agreement on the new Prague leadership from representatives of the ANO movement. In response to his words, the leader of the ANO organization in Prague, Patrik Nacher, announced that his party is willing to temporarily support the minority leadership of Prague until. At the same time, mutual accusations between the SPOLU coalition and the Pirates about who is blocking the negotiations and is not willing to make any compromise have also become the folklore of failed negotiations. The first deputy mayor Petr Hlaváček revealed the behind-the-scenes of these Blesk meetings, who participated directly in most of them and had the opportunity to observe the entire development from a distance.
After SPOLU announced that they were moving to the same table with the ANO movement, Petr Hlaváček published several diagrams on his social networks in which he explains why neither STAN nor Pii wanted to accept SPOLU’s offer. “According to the percentage of representation, the mayors and the Pirates have a little more than the coalition TOGETHER, and according to the mandates in the council, we have one less seat, so we are two roughly equally strong groups, and that’s what we started from.Petr Hlaváček told Blesk. According to him, this means that the distribution of power should be such that no one feels that they can be easily outvoted at any time. However, the proposal that he submitted to the TOGETHER coalition would work in practice in such a way that all initiatives at the council would be done without the votes of the Pirates and STAN.
Who didn’t want to agree?
Petr Hlaváček does not agree with the fact that one of the parties, whether the Pirates or the coalition TOGETHER, would consciously block the negotiations, and according to him, it is not even possible to say unequivocally who was more willing to compromise. “It’s really not just on one side. But the truth is that colleagues from SPOL insisted on six councilors from the beginning and, apart from one moment when Mr. Svoboda indicated that it could still be negotiated, they did not back down from their demand for six councilors and the post of mayor. This, in turn, led to a certain nervousness for the Pirates, and perhaps due to the fact that they are a younger group, sometimes there was some personal misunderstanding“, Hlaváček revealed behind the scenes of the coalition negotiations.
The fact that the negotiations lasted the longest in the history of the Czech Republic was increased by Hlaváček mainly due to the long time delays between individual meetings. “If I had to describe it without any emotional charge, it was that colleagues from SPOLU rediscovered ten of the same models, we looked for a solution, and it basically happened again at the next meeting,” Hlaváček explained. According to Hlaváček, at the penultimate meeting, they said goodbye with some hope that TOGETHER they would agree to the compromise proposed by him. However, at the next table and so far the last meeting, SPOLU representatives again insisted on their original proposal, and despite the fact that the negotiator did not say it out loud, after its conclusion, SPOLU representatives announced that the negotiations were over. “It seems premature to me and I say everywhere that we should return to the same table,” added Hlaváček.
How will it all turn out?
As for his opinion on what the new Prague leadership will look like and when it will start functioning, he openly admits that he does not know. “I think that we should return to the negotiating table, I think that associate professor Svoboda should be the mayor, and that there should be fair relations in the council,” Hlaváček told Blesku. At the same time, he also points out: “if the colleagues from SPOL are counting on the fact that the ladies and gentlemen of ANO will hide them for four years, I think that they will be cruelly missed and will pay a political price for it”.
Constitutive meeting of the Prague council after the elections. November 3, 2022, Prague.
Author: ČTK / Šulová Kateřina