SPD calls national leadership meeting after Czech Senate election flop

The SPD movement has called a national leadership meeting (the party presidium) to assess the election results: not a single party candidate succeeded in the first round of the Senate elections. According to Fiala’s earlier statement, the leadership will account for the result at the meeting.

“In my view, SPD did not do well in the elections — there is no other way to put it — and we must prepare SPD for the next period, in which we want to succeed,” Fiala told Czech Television.

What the presidium will decide and what happens to the leadership

The movement is expected to have analyses of the election results ready for the meeting. In addition, next year the party faces a vote on its leadership for a new term. Fiala did not rule out running for his post again, but did not rule out the opposite either: “I am considering both options,” he said.

Immediately after the elections, Fiala named as the first reason the failure to make SPD’s core themes — migration, attitude toward the European Union and the “green course” (Green Deal) — themes of the campaign. He also considers it a mistake that in many places the coalition with PRO, the “Free” party and Trikolora, which ran in the last Chamber of Deputies elections, was not repeated: in some places these parties ran against each other and took voters from one another.

Municipal election results in numbers

This year SPD returned to the level of its first participation in municipal elections in 2018, after which 161 of the movement’s candidates won seats. Compared with the result four years ago, the party markedly weakened its position in regional capitals, where in most of them it failed to enter the representative bodies at all. It remained in six — the same number as eight years ago. In autumn 2022, lists with SPD representatives won seats in all 13 regional capitals, including Prague.

According to the movement’s chairman Tomio Okamura, the results confirmed the party’s nationwide ratings, which hover around eight percent. However, the expectation that at least one SPD candidate would reach the second round of the Senate elections did not come true.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz