Negotiations on the Prague municipality: What about Prague Sob?
Four months after the elections, a possible coalition is beginning to take shape at the Prague municipality. Bohuslav Svoboda (ODS) backed down and on Monday offered the Pirates one more seat in the city council.
The new coalition could thus look like this: five seats including the mayor for the Spolu coalition, four for the Pirates and two for Mayors and independents. However, the pirates still want to rule with Praha Sobě, with whom they created the post-election Alliance for Stability. On Thursday, they asked the STAN movement to tell them their position on the fact that Praha Sobě could also be in the future municipal coalition. However, it rejects its presence in the coalition TOGETHER (ODS, TOP 09 and KDU-ČSL).
The representative club of the Pirates, regardless of the resolution, want to continue negotiating the offer TOGETHER. “We also need to get a clear position of the STAN movement on the possibility of a variant composition of the coalition in the ratio of 5-3-2-1, i.e. including Prague Sobě while maintaining five seats for TOGETHER. The inquiry about the STAN movement has already been sent,” stated the chairman of the representatives for the Pirates, Daniel Mazur.
According to their electoral leader Petr Hlaváček, STAN is now promoting a council composed of government parties. “We for STAN are now working with the 5-4-2 version, i.e. five for Spolu, four for the Pirates and two for us, which we ourselves proposed at the beginning of December. We consider her reasonable,” Hlaváček told Czech Television. He also repeated what he had already said after Monday’s coalition negotiations, namely that Praha Sobě has competent people in its ranks, and therefore deserves decent representation in the representative committees. The leader of Praha Sobě, Jan Čižinský, he refused on Wednesday.
The longest negotiation ever
Negotiations on the new management of the capital city last almost four months, which is the longest ever since the Czech Republic was established. One of the main points of contention was the TOGETHER coalition to have a majority in the council on Monday, which it backed away from. It unblocked the long “concrete” negotiations.
Since the elections in the fall of 1994, the longest wait for the election of the new city leadership was a month and a half. In 2010, the council and mayor were elected 45 days after the election, four years later it took a day longer. In 1994 and 1998, the mayors were elected less than two weeks after the elections.
The coalition TOGETHER won the municipal elections last fall, winning 19 mandates in the 65-member council. ANO ended second with 14 mandates. The third Pirates have 13 representatives and Praha Sobě 11 mandates. Five representatives belong to STAN, the sixth SPD won three mandates.
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