Daughter of Late Senator Kubera Outraged: SPD-Led Coalition Is Exploiting Her Father's Name

In Jindřichův Hradec, the "Velký křížek pro Hradec" coalition — bringing together SPD, Motoristé, Svobodní, Pro and Trikolóra under MP Libor Vondráček — has built its election campaign around the name of the late ODS politician Jaroslav Kubera. A coalition press release features the slogan: "Free public transport and free waste collection! Following Kubera's example!"

Kubera's daughter, Vendula Vinšová — whose father served for many years as mayor of Teplice and later as chairman of the Senate — says that none of the coalition's representatives ever asked her permission to use her father's name. "No one ever cleared this with me," she explains. "I had no idea about it, and I certainly wouldn't have agreed to it," she says.

According to Vinšová, MP Vondráček and Senator Hamplová have invoked Kubera's name before, and this isn't the first time it has angered her. "It drives me mad," she admitted. She says she has no intention of pursuing legal action, but condemns the practice nonetheless. Ironically, Vinšová herself is running in the municipal elections for ODS — the very party her father belonged to — and now finds herself watching a rival coalition use his image for its own purposes.

Vondráček sees no problem with any of this. He argues that invoking Kubera's name simply illustrates that a right-leaning approach to public services already paid for through taxes was, for the late politician, an argument in favour of free waste collection and free transport.

The coalition's programme does indeed echo many of the policies Kubera introduced in Teplice: he brought in free waste collection there back in 2002, and the rule still applies today — though in practice the city simply covers the cost from other revenue streams. Teplice also introduced free public transport under Kubera, but only for pensioners; Vondráček is now proposing to extend free travel to all residents of Jindřichův Hradec.

According to city spokeswoman Karolina Bartošková, scrapping waste-collection fees would cost the city roughly 12–12.5 million crowns a year, with free transport adding a further 6.5 million crowns. For comparison, Jindřichův Hradec's annual budget runs to about 940 million crowns in revenue against expenditure of roughly 1.5 billion crowns.

Another idea borrowed from Kubera concerns paid parking in the city centre. Back in 2007, Teplice temporarily scrapped parking fees as an experiment, to show drivers what kind of chaos would follow. The experiment was repeated several times and failed every time — the city centre simply became clogged with cars, and the fees were reinstated. The most recent stretch of free parking in Teplice came three years ago, when the contract with the previous parking operator expired.

Vondráček himself does not explicitly call for free parking, but he opposes expanding paid zones for residents. In Teplice, residents currently pay 800 crowns a year for parking, while pensioners and people with disabilities pay half that. According to Vondráček, Jindřichův Hradec has almost no paid parking zones, and he believes the city could save money by abandoning costly projects such as the planetarium, the felling of trees and paving over of a park for a brewery costing more than 500 million crowns, or the so-called central park on Vajgar, priced at around 50 million crowns.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz