Green Party Leader Ondřej Liška
A Prague Municipal Court has upheld the Oct. 15-16 local election results in the face of a judicial challenge, paving the way for a likely grand coalition in City Hall between the Civic Democrats (ODS) and the Social Democrats (ČSSD).
The judgment was released shortly after 1:30 p.m. today.
“The Municipal Court concluded that during the municipal elections in Prague Oct. 15 and 16, 2010, no violation of Act. no. 491/2001 Coll. occurred that could have affected the results of the elections as described. … The proposal to dismiss the election results as invalid has been rejected,” wrote Jiří Tichý, chairman of the three-judge panel.
The challenge to the results was filed by a coalition of small political parties, led by the Green Party, who argued that a redistricting plan was pushed through by the previous ODS-dominated City Assembly. Both the Greens and the Public Affairs (VV) party passed the 5 percent threshold that usually entitles a party to enter the City Assembly, but neither will be represented in the city’s legislative body as the seven electoral districts designed by the ODS means their candidates were not able to finish high enough in their respective districts.
In an earlier interview, Green Party Leader Ondřej Liška told The Prague Post that he expected this initial lower-court ruling to go against his challenge, but vowed to appeal the decision to the country’s Constitutional Court, where he felt more confident of a ruling in his favor.
The center-right TOP 09 party received the most votes in Prague voting, but in recent weeks the traditional powers on both sides of the political spectrum — the ODS on the right and the ČSSD on the left — have increasingly looked to be moving toward cooperation in city government. While the two parties differ ideologically, as long-established parties their ties run deep with business and special interest groups, and the desire to maintain these clientelist networks appears to trump the more likely coalition partnership between the ODS and TOP 09, both center-right parties that currently participate in the governing coalition at the national level.
Prague is a traditional stronghold of the ODS in particular, and the party has suffered consecutive defeats at the hands of TOP 09, both in May’s general election and during local voting in October. These were the first times the ODS has been defeated in the capital city since the party was founded in the early 1990s. This has led many a political analyst to note that the ODS will likely do its utmost to prevent TOP 09 from displacing it as the dominant party on the political right — even if that means cooperating with its longtime adversary, the ČSSD.
Should a so-called grand coalition form in Prague, the most popular parties in terms of votes in both the country’s largest city and at the national level would not be represented in their respective governments. In Prague, TOP 09 would be pushed into the opposition. At the national level, the ČSSD holds a majority in the Senate and the most seats in the country’s lower house but remains sidelined from the center-right government of Prime Minister Petr Nečas (ODS). Grand coalitions have already solidified in three of the country’s four largest cities, with Prague as the lone holdout.
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