Huge fiasco of TOGETHER and ANO in Prague: Svoboda was not elected mayor, Pirates and STAN are back in the game.
The events at the Prague City Hall this week had a curious continuation. The SPOLU coalition first discussed with the ANO movement about the election of a minority council, but they did not agree on its form. So they came up with the option of electing only the mayor, not the entire council. This scenario was announced by the Prague bosses of SPOLU and ANO on a joint press release, and it looked like they had the votes ready for it.
Two mayors at once
This created a rather confusing situation: the new mayor Svoboda would be in office, but at the same time a councilor from the previous election period, i.e. for Pirates, Praha soba, STAN and TOP 09. The outgoing mayor Hřib would also remain a member of the council. TOGETHER wanted to keep this complicated construction until February, the remaining parties in the council were already counting on it.
However, SPOLU representative Hana Kordová Marvanová ultimately refused to vote for the agreement with ANO. By the way, it was Marvanová who received the most crosses out of all the candidates TOGETHER in the recent elections. However, she has refused any cooperation with ANO from the beginning, and accordingly she intended to vote today. The TOGETHER bosses probably did not find out her opinion in advance, or maybe Marvanová made her decision only during the assembly.
Either way, the result is clear. Coalition TOGETHER A quarter of a year after the change to create no new coalition in Prague, the old council headed by Zdenek Hřibe remains in power. Just for interest: the negotiations drag on for so long that Hřib has already become the third longest-serving post-revolutionary mayor after Pavlo Bém and Jan Koukal.
And why do the negotiations in Prague take so long? Mainly because the TOGETHER coalition did not give the Pirates and STAN any offer that they could accept given the outcome of the election. Let’s recap the post-election events.
Election failure
Although SPOLU declared its willingness to come to an agreement with the Pirates and STAN from the beginning, it presented them with relatively disadvantageous offers. The election result was the worst for the right in Prague since the revolution and led it to negotiations with Babiš’s movement. But first to the negotiations on the “government floor plan.”
Talks about a government-style coalition collapsed last week. The Pirates and STAN rejected the offer of the SOLE coalition, according to which SOLE had to have both the mayor and the majority in the council, and also a new post of “deputy for investments”, which would, for example, represent the prestigious transport management, stripped of essential competences. And all this belongs to the election result – Pirates and STAN won more votes in Prague than TOGETHER.
The bad result of TOGETHER in the elections is the basis of the current situation. Part of the SPOLU coalition memorandum for Prague is also an agreement on the eventual distribution of the number of seats in the city row, which does not include a lower number than 7 seats and a distribution of 3 for ODS, 3 for TOP 09 and 1 for KDU-ČSL.
If TOGETHER had 5 councilors, either ODS would have to have only 2, or TOP 09 only 1, or the People’s Party would have none. Neither side wants to make such concessions. The declared goal of TOGETHER in the Prague elections was to get at least 30%, according to surveys, the potential was over 40%. That is why SPOLU counted on such a high number of councilors.
However, the actual result remained far below expectations. In last year’s parliamentary elections, TOGETHER won 40% in Prague, only 24% in the municipal elections. Moreover, there was an unusually lower voter turnout in Prague than nationwide, which, for example, Bohumil Pečinka attributes to the fact that Prague voters TOTALLY rejected their candidate and leader Svoboda and therefore did not come to the elections in large numbers.
In addition, the TOGETHER parties also fell in terms of the number of mandates. ODS won 14 representatives independently in the last elections, this year only 10 (if we count Hana Kordová Marvanová, who is independent but nominated for ODS). TOP 09 dropped from 9 mandates to 7, only the People’s Party improved slightly: instead of one representative, they have two.
The number of right-wing parties in Prague has also never been so weak. Even after 2010, the ODS, TOP 09 and KDU-ČSL in Prague gave a combined 46 mandates, in the next two election periods first 26, then 21, in this election period they have only 19 TOGETHER. Just for illustration – they have more than the ODS in Prague, both Pirates and Čižinský Prague itself. This is the result of a party that was once said that Václav Klaus’ tennis racket would be enough to win in Prague. Not so long ago, such a failure would have led to the resignation of the Prague leadership of these parties, as well as the current negotiation fiasco and the endless search for a coalition.
Who is arrogant this time?
So much for simple sums. SPOLU often interprets that the negotiations failed due to the demands of the Pirates and a kind of “arrogance” of Zdeňko Hřiba. No one from SPOLU has yet explained what they mean by Hřib’s arrogance and what influence it has on the negotiations. The agreement proposed by TOGETHER was rejected not only by the Pirates, but also by STAN. “When you have a majority in the council, and on top of that, the mayor on one side, who has a difference of one mandate and is weaker in terms of percentages, it is not fair,” Petr Hlaváček said in an interview with the leader of Reflex STAN.
In short, it seems from the proposal that TOGETHER was not interested in a coalition on the government plan and preferred a connection with Babiš’s ANO, which, however, has now also failed. The failure of negotiations with the Pirates and STAN threw TOGETHER at the “arrogant Hřib.” Who is to blame for the failure this time? “Arrogant” Marvan? Let us be surprised.