Jan Kasl: Voters would like a coalition Together with the Pirates in Prague
On Sunday, September 24, the results of the elections to the Prague City Council were announced. Do you still remember it? It wasn’t until November 3rd that the constituent assembly met, which did not agree on the election of the council, as well as the first continuation on November 24th. On Thursday, December 15, i.e. after 82 days, another continuation was held, which only has the election of the mayor, not the 11-member council, as it should be according to the law.
According to the interpretation of the Ministry of the Interior, until the full council is elected, the “former” will remain in office, and that is the original mayor, who will become an ordinary councilor (without being removed from his position at the same time?). He was not elected councilor four years ago, but directly as mayor; if he ended his term as mayor, he would no longer even be a councillor. Will the new mayor stand outside the old council? Anglo-Saxons wrote “wtf”. I would use an analogy with the fictional town – Kocourkov. The mayor will stand at the head of the city and council, but it’s difficult to advise, there is no place for him yet. How will the city and council manage? And how long? How will the “old” square and the council work? And how should directors of trade unions and city organizations understand this? And 57 city districts? Roughly 1.3 million Praguers?
The interpretation of the Ministry of the Interior, that the council must be fully elected, otherwise it “doesn’t work”, I personally consider questionable, but I am not a lawyer. As an ordinary citizen, I can state that the winner of the election together cannot create a majority coalition, leading Prague to the darkness of Mordor. And that’s especially because the candidate for mayor – at the same time a member of parliament and a practicing doctor in the past, the dismissed exponent Bohuslav Svoboda – will be elected only thanks to the votes of ANO, the ideological opposite of Spolu, and also the vote of the famous spy Radmila Kleslova. What kind of support will ANO want from Spolu? Will there be a shaky grand coalition with 33 votes?
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I do not understand why Spolu does not accept the cooperation of the Pirates and Prague as a common post-election alliance and does not accept the role of the strongest member in the council with the mayor and four other council members, of which, for example, two deputies and the alliance does not release four and STAN two councilor seats. I believe that the majority of voters would be happy about it.
After the previous sleepy season in Prague, led by the ANO movement with Adriana Krnáčová, over the last four years, a relatively stable coalition has managed to start the preparation and implementation of many necessary investments, including in cooperation with members of TOP 09, who ran as part of Spolu this year. The post-election coalition of democratic subjects would have 48 votes and could jointly solve a number of problems and influence Prague in favor of us Prague residents.
The author is an architect and former mayor of Prague in 1998-2002.