"The President Is an Idiot" as a Crime? ANO MP Mocks the Very Idea He Once Championed in 2016

Czechia is once again debating the idea of a criminal offense for insulting the head of state — this time the discussion was prompted by a column from a journalist at Info.cz, and it was publicly ridiculed by the former Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and current chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee for ANO, Radek Vondráček.

Vondráček wrote sarcastically on X that jail time for insulting the president isn't enough — what's really needed is "mandatory morning worship before a portrait of the great leader." The comment sparked a wave of reminders about 2016, when Miloš Zeman was head of state and a group of 60 MPs pushed to reintroduce a law criminalizing "defamation of the president."

According to parliamentary records from that time, the proposal called for penalties of up to one year in prison for publicly degrading the president's dignity and undermining his authority. The initiative was led by the Communists, but it also received enthusiastic backing from MPs of the then-existing Úsvit movement, as well as from ANO.

Among the authors of that bill were figures still well-known in politics today from ANO: MP Milan Brázda, former MP Margita Balaštíková, and former MP Stanislav Berkovec, now a member of the Czech Television Council. The list of signatories also included current SPD MP Jaroslav Foldyna, who at the time still belonged to the Social Democratic party.

Vondráček himself never signed that document, but as deputy chairman of the Constitutional Law Committee at the time, he did nothing to oppose the initiative pushed by his own party colleagues. Later, some ANO MPs, after actually reading the text of their own bill, withdrew their signatures — but the reputational damage was already done.

Against this backdrop, Vondráček's present-day mockery of an identical idea looks, to put it mildly, hypocritical. Experts describe this as a symptom of a broader and more troubling trend in Czech politics — treating rules differently depending on who benefits from them at any given moment.

Similar cases of "legislative favoritism" have popped up before: during discussions of Filip Turek's failed nomination as minister, the same people alternately criticized and defended comparable practices depending on whether the person involved was Miloš Zeman or Petr Pavel. The same pattern applies to conflict-of-interest legislation, once tailored specifically to target Andrej Babiš — and now being proposed for softening, once again for his benefit.

Criminal prosecution for insulting the head of state has a long history in the Czech lands: from an article in the 1852 Criminal Code dating back to imperial times, through the case of ethnic German Hubert Pospíšil, who spent a month behind bars in 1924 for saying "the president is an idiot," to the 1962 conviction of publicist Vladimír Škutina for calling President Novotný a "bull, a swindler, and a real despot."

The law against "defaming" the president was finally abolished in 1998 under President Václav Havel — who himself, shortly before that, had dropped the prosecution of activist Petr Cibulka for calling him a "pig and a beast." As observers note, in a democratic state with Czechia's historical experience, such a law belongs exactly where it ended up — in the dustbin of history, regardless of one's personal feelings toward this or that president.

By the Around Prague newsroom