Czech far-right party admits failure in EU elections

The Czech Freedom and Direct Democracy (ID) party will convene a committee within the next two weeks to analyse its disappointing performance in the recent European elections, party leader Tomio Okamura announced on Tuesday.

In this weekend’s European elections, the coalition of Trikolora and Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) secured only 5.73% of the vote and one seat in the European Parliament, losing one compared to the previous EU elections in 2019. Ivan David, the incumbent MEP, retained his position by receiving more preferential votes than the coalition leader Petr Mach.

Mach, an EU lawmaker in the European Parliament between 2014 and 2017, switched to the SPD from the liberal Svobodní party, which he himself founded in 2009. He is known for his Eurosceptic stance and for writing a book on leaving the EU.

While the coalition campaigned on its long-standing themes – especially criticism of the EU, climate policy and anti-immigration stances – the moderate success it enjoyed in the 2019 EU elections (9.1%) and the 2021 Czech parliamentary elections was not seen this time.

“Of course, we said that this is a failure for us, and we need to know why and what happened. On the one hand, we are doing our own analyses. On the other hand, we are having external analyses carried out by sociologists and experts who deal with the topic,” said SPD’s deputy chairman Radim Fiala.

The party wants to quickly diagnose the reasons for its electoral underperformance in order to better prepare for the upcoming regional elections in the autumn and the Czech parliamentary elections next year.

“We have an initial analysis ready,” the party chairman Okamura confirmed.

In this year’s elections, several parties sought to attract far-right and anti-establishment voters – notably the populist ANO (Renew Europe) party of former prime minister Andrej Babiš and the new coalition Přísaha a Motoristé (NI), led by entrepreneur and former racing driver Filip Turek.

Despite Turek’s controversial use of Nazi symbols, his coalition won 10.3% of the vote, securing two MEP seats and becoming the third most popular choice in Czechia.

(Aneta Zachová | Euractiv.cz)

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