Pirates Leading Prague Election Polls

Ivan Bartos Milos Zeman

Prague, Sept 4 (CTK) – The Pirates have a chance of winning the local election in Prague and would like to succeed in other Czech towns, too, their chairman Ivan Bartos said at the party’s launch of election campaign today.

 

The Pirates are promising open town halls, accessible housing, transparent decision making, involvement of citizens in towns’ management and end to clientelism.

 

“We truly have the ambition of winning the elections in Prague. According to the last polls, the Pirates are a clear favourite,” Bartos said.

 

According to a research by the Kantar TNS pollster for Czech Television (CT), the party would gain 21.5 percent of the vote in the capital and thus come first, while the senior government ANO movement would gain 14 percent and the Civic Democrats (ODS) and Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) 13 percent each.

 

As regards post-election coalitions, the Pirates would like to make agreements with parties mainly based on their programme priorities and also on their political integrity. It would be difficult to enter a coalition with the Communists (KSCM) or the SPD, Bartos said.

 

“In each town where we have set up a list of candidates, success to us is to not just do better than in the past local elections, but better than in the past parliamentary elections,” he added.

 

This year, the Pirates are running with 3,000 candidates in 165 towns and municipalities.

 

Almost all Pirates’ leaders in regional towns have promised to end the clientelism pursued by the local political establishment.

 

“The people in the town halls have been running their business for 20 or 25 years,” Bartos said.

 

Bartos did not want to anticipate on the Pirates’ result in the parallel Senate elections, saying the party also supported other parties’ candidates in some wards.