Prague, July 26 (CTK) – The split of the election coalition of the Czech junior government Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) and the Mayors and Independents (STAN) movement shortly before the October general election will cause problems to both entities, experts addressed by CTK agreed today.
Political scientist Lubomir Kopecek says the alliance ended mainly because of the Christian Democrats’ fears of not gaining 10 percent of the vote with STAN, which is the necessary threshold for a two-party coalition to enter the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Czech parliament, while a single party only needs 5 percent.
His colleague Kamil Svec says the main problem is that the coalition has neglected promotion.
Both experts are of the view that the coalition of STAN and the KDU-CSL had a potential to enter the lower house jointly.
“It would have been sufficient if they had invested much more energy in promoting their new trademark and making their faces and programme visible,” Svec said.
“They managed nothing except for presenting their logo and a few clips in two months. This is a quite sad picture of their cooperation,” he added.
Kopecek said the main mistake was timing as the parties should have allied earlier than at the beginning of this year.
The public opinion polls predicting that the coalition will not enter the Chamber of Deputies did not fully react to the new political force, he added.
The poll results were the main reason why the Christian Democrats withdrew from the coalition eventually.
“There were extremely few polls assessing this entity as a coalition. Nothing could be deduced from them actually,” Kopecek pointed out.
The coalition split will cause problems with the election strategy to both parties that wanted to present “the third force” jointly.
Now, three months ahead of the general election, they must be seeking a new story, which is very difficult in such a short time, Kopecek said.
The composition of the new lists of election candidates might be another problem, said Svec.
Kopecek is of the view that the Christian Democrats will lose the opportunity to strengthen their position in the regions in which they usually fail after STAN’s departure.
“The Christian Democrats actually give up winning mandates in some Czech regions,” he told CTK.
Kopecek also pointed out that the Christian Democrats cannot take their entering the Chamber of Deputies for granted since their poll results have steadily oscillated around the 5-percent threshold.
Not to gain any mandates in the lower house would be a more serious problem to the KDU-CSL than to STAN as the former considers the general election the most important, while STAN has traditionally more focused on the local level.
Svec, on the contrary, said the Christian Democrats can remain calm as they have their faithful voters, while STAN may end up in troubles since it has no stable supporters.
Kopecek refused to speculate about whether the split of the KDU-CSL/STAN coalition would influence the election results of other parties. He, however, admitted that the situation of one strong party and several minor ones in the lower house after the election would be advantageous for the strongest party.
“This enables it to come to an agreement with one or two entities and have a choice,” he added.
Instead of the announced “third force,” there might be several quite small parties in the Chamber of Deputies, Svec said.
“From this point of view, STAN’s solo candidacy is not very far-sighted. Three or four small parties are not likely to make a sufficiently efficient counterweight,” he added.
