Czech election results: opposition strong only together, ANO slips

Czechia’s autumn elections, for the Senate and for local councils, ended in defeat for the ruling ANO movement: it won not a single Senate seat and lost votes and seats in most regional centres. The main winners were a united opposition and local initiatives.

Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and opposition leaders Martin Kupka and Vít Rakušan will, analysts say, have to respond to the message from voters. The ANO leader is reportedly angry about the results and is preparing “purges” in the movement, while opposition leaders face an unavoidable discussion about cooperation. Here are four conclusions that can be drawn from the vote.

The opposition is strong only together

The opposition parties confirmed a simple truth: where they do not fight each other, ANO can be beaten almost comfortably. This was visible in both the Senate and the local elections.

Jan Grolich of KDU-ČSL, Jan Grulich of TOP 09, Jan Sobotka and Zbyněk Linhart (both of STAN) won already in the first round. Personal charm was not the only factor: in their districts, each was the only, and therefore shared, opposition candidate against ANO.

The same worked in many towns and cities. The best example is Ústí nad Labem, a north Bohemian stronghold of ANO and SPD, where seven liberal parties joined forces under the name “One Ústí” and won with 51 percent, perhaps the biggest sensation of this year’s elections.

The leaders of the five parliamentary parties, who after the lost 2025 election began looking after only their own brands, now have to think about how to come together. It remains an open question whether they will all run in the 2029 Chamber of Deputies election in one coalition or in two blocs: a conservative one around ODS and a more liberal one around STAN.

The first cracks in trust in ANO

For the strongest party of the governing coalition, this autumn’s elections were a failure. The Senate round ended in complete disaster: not a single seat. Babiš’s movement also slipped at the local level: votes and seats fell in every regional capital except Plzeň.

The opposition speaks of a “crushing defeat”, but it would be a mistake to read this as the beginning of the end of the Babiš era. These are typical “mid-term” elections in which governing parties always lose while the opposition gains. It is also long-standing experience that ANO supporters turn out in smaller numbers for so-called second-order elections. In nationwide polls, which are key for the Chamber of Deputies election, Babiš’s movement still dominates: despite a slight drop, it stays at around 30 percent.

Even so, Babiš must see the first cracks in trust and hints of future problems. He himself admitted that the ANO brand alone is no longer the rocket that automatically carries anyone into any office: he too needs to find interesting personalities. Not even a celebrity such as singer Michal David, who took part in the campaign of the movement’s candidate in western Bohemia, was enough.

Another blow for the ANO leader is the realisation that he is on his own: his partners (SPD and the Motorists) are losing support, and everyone else is against him. This realisation that parties and voters from the other camp will never accept him may lead to his “unleashing” and even greater radicalisation. The prime minister himself talks about “reflection and a restart” of ANO.

The end of party strongholds

Czech politics long worked on the principle that each party had its own territory, which it rightly regarded as its electoral stronghold: ANO in northern Bohemia and Moravia and part of Silesia, the Christian Democrats in South Moravia, the Mayors in the Central Bohemian and Liberec regions, ODS in Prague, Brno, Plzeň and Mladá Boleslav, and SPD in the border regions.

This year all of that collapsed. ANO lost ground in its northern outposts, not only in Ústí but also in Děčín, Chomutov, Havířov, Karviná and Frýdek-Místek. Another paradox: ODS lost its former right-wing towns but gained markedly where the left used to rule, in towns in central and southern Moravia and in the Vysočina region.

A perfect illustration is STAN’s win in Prague, because the Mayors movement was founded in 2009 mainly as a defence of small towns and villages that wanted to take money away from the Czech capital. The trend of personalised politics keeps growing: party brands and programmes lose importance, while leaders whom people trust or distrust gain it. This is sometimes called “leadocracy”. So in “red” Znojmo, people vote for the popular mayor František Koudela, and nobody minds that he is from ODS.

Local movements push out parties

Linked to this is the collapse of all nationwide parliamentary parties at the local level. Where they had interesting personalities at the head, they held on somehow. Otherwise, the main winners of the elections are all kinds of local movements. They used to dominate in the countryside; after this vote they are in the cities too.

Local movements won in a third of the 75 district towns. A few names of winning groups: Benešov for Life, Independent Prachatice, Ústí residents in Ústí nad Orlicí, Our Town Frýdek-Místek and the people of Uherské Hradiště. The unpopularity of big parties and the popularity of local initiatives have reached even regional cities with hundreds of thousands of residents. Local groups have not won there yet, but they often took second or third place.

One example is Liberec, where the movement Better Liberec finished second with 22.5 percent, an incredible success given that the group was formed only a few months before the vote. In the capital, the association Prague for Ourselves came third, in Olomouc the initiative For Olomouc, in Zlín the movement Z21, and in Pardubice the group We Live Pardubice. Sociologists predict that in four years local initiatives will win even in the largest cities and that traditional political parties will play an almost insignificant role in local elections.

Read also: Brno: what to see and where to go

Source: seznamzpravy.cz