In more than half of the regional cities, the post-election arrangement has already been decided. ANO will have a mayor in Ostrava, Pardubice, Zlín, Pilsen, Olomouc and probably also in Karlovy Vary. In a number of cities, the movement will cooperate with the Spolu coalition. The parties also negotiated together in Prague, but ODS, TOP 09 and KDU-ČSL prefer a future coalition based on the government plan, negotiations are complicated by the Pirates.
The opposition ANO won the municipal elections by a landslide in most regional and statutory cities. On Thursday, Jiří Korec from the victorious ANO, which went into a coalition with the ODS, KDU-ČSL and Pirates, was again appointed mayor of Zlín. Tomáš Macura (ANO) also defended the seat in Ostrava, where the movement will cooperate in a broad coalition with ODS, TOP 09, KDU-ČSL, STAN and ČSSD.
An identical coalition was eventually born in Brno as well. Markéta Vaňková from ODS will be the mayor for the second time. Originally, the Pirates were also expected to be there, but only a few hours before the coalition agreement was signed, they withdrew from cooperation, they are bothered by the current case surrounding the former deputy mayor Petr Hladík (TOP 09 Brno), who was investigated by the NCOZ in connection with the recent raid on the municipality, among but Hladík was not accused.
Uncertainty surrounding the involvement of the Pirate Party in the city management also prevails in Prague, where negotiations will last the longest. The winning coalition Together declared shortly after the elections that it wanted to join forces with STAN and the Pirates, but joint negotiations, especially with the Pirates, were not successful. Also due to the personnel conditions that they set for the winning group, they are particularly specific towards the criminally prosecuted People’s Representative Jan Wolf.
In addition, on Thursday, the representatives of the Pirates concluded an agreement with their partner Prague, they want to continue exclusively together in further post-election negotiations. Zdeněk Hřib (Pirates) indicated that the reason for this is the slow progress in negotiations with the Spolu coalition. Together with Jan Čižínský’s association, they have a total of 24 votes in the 65-member council. The Together coalition, which won 19 seats after the elections, but from the beginning did not want to negotiate with Prague at all.
A member of Spolu’s negotiating team, Pavel Zajíček from ODS, said in response to this move that he respects the individual actions of political entities. “However, the TOGETHER coalition has said from the beginning that the program and its implementation are important to it. And both Pirates and Praha Sobě have separate programs. We are now at a stage where our program teams are just meeting and looking for programmatic breakthroughs. Such negotiations with Praha Sobě and Piráty have not yet taken place. And without evaluating the program intersections, we cannot responsibly say the future composition of the coalition. The dates of the scheduled meetings still apply to us,” he wrote in a statement.
The Together coalition could eventually try to bypass the Pirates and Prague and come to an agreement with the second ANO movement. Together, the parties would only have a fragile majority of 33 votes. The mayor will most likely be Bohuslav Svoboda from ODS.