Prague, June 27 (CTK) – Czech presidential candidate Michal Horacek is ready to collect signatures for his two rivals, Jiri Drahos and Marek Hilser, because he wants them to run for the head of state in the 2018 election, his representative has told CTK.
Presidential candidates must collect at least 50,000 signatures by citizens under their candidacy or be proposed by 10 senators or 20 deputies. All the candidates, including current President Milos Zeman who will seek re-election, decided to seek support from citizens.
Horacek said he collected the required number of signatures already in May, but that he wants to continue with the effort and collect more signature than Zeman gathered in the previous campaign before the 2013 presidential election.
He said he would like to collect signatures for Drahos and Hilser because he wanted to improve the democratic environment. “As democracy is an opportunity to choose, I would like to help them get the set number of signatures as soon as possible,” he said.
Horacek said he would not gather signatures for Zeman because “the values he represents are incompatible with those which I represent.”
Hilser welcomed Horacek’s offer on his Facebook profile. He said he appreciated that Horacek is ready to help candidates whose financial resources are more limited.
He said the Czech Republic is standing between “the cultivation of democratic values and increasing authoritarian tendencies.”
Hilser recently said he gathered about 7,000 signatures under his petition.
Drahos is rather embarrassed by Horacek’s offer, Lenka Pastorcakova, from his team, told CTK. She said Horacek did not let them know of his intention beforehand. Horacek’s plan was of no use and it rather disrupted Drahos’s system of direct communication with volunteers and supporters, she added.
Patorcakova said Drahos had a different strategy than Horacek. She said somebody from Drahos’s team always has to talk to those who decide to add their signatures under his candidacy.
She said Drahos has collected roughly 30,000 signatures under his petition.
Zeman, 72, is the favourite of the election due early next year, however, the popularity of the three other candidates increased. Opinion polls indicate that the physician Hilser, 41, is an outsider. Former head of the Academy of Sciences, Drahos, 68, seems to be more popular than the businessman and lyricist Horacek, 64.
