Prague, June 22 (CTK) – The Czech senior government Social Democrats (CSSD) will present their new election manager and the leadership will discuss details of the campaign before the October 20-21 general election on Friday next week, election leader Lubomir Zaoralek told journalists today.
The new election manager will replace Jan Birke who offered his post last week when Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka resigned as party head over the party’s declining preferences.
The campaign and the party is temporarily headed by the first deputy chairman and interior minister, Milan Chovanec, and Zaoralek, who is foreign minister, took up the role of the election leader.
Zaoralek called on the other parties today to present clearly formulated political programmes in an allusion to a book by government ANO movement chairman Andrej Babis, former finance minister, which is his vision of the Czech Republic in 2035.
ANO is the election favourite. According to the latest public opinion poll, released by the STEM agency on June 19, ANO would win 32.8 percent of the vote, followed by the Communists (KSCM) with 12.7 percent and the CSSD with 11.4 percent.
Zaoralek said Babis’s book, which he launched today, is nothing but a propaganda marketing move.
Zaoralek said the CSSD wants more regional party members to take part in the election campaign and to “redesign” its logo.
The party board also dealt with a statement Senate chairman Milan Stech (CSSD) made last week, saying the tradespeople’s health and social insurance payments should be raised to secure employees for firms because they would prefer being employed to paying more money to the state.
This earned Stech criticism from both inside the CSSD and other parties.
“The CSSD esteems the tradespeople and their work very much. Our goal is to secure the best possible conditions for their business. Colleague Stech’s statement was unfortunate, but it was partially torn out of context,” Chovanec reacted in a press release.
