The organization Million Moments will hold a protest in defense of democratic institutions on Sunday, March 1st, in Prague.
The event will start at 4 p.m. with a march from Hradčanska to the Old Town Square, which will be followed by a demonstration. The protest is a reaction to Wednesday’s election of Stanislav Křeček as the Ombudsman.
A Million Moments had previously announced that they would convene the demonstration if Křeček was elected.
“The Prague event will not be about protesting against Stanislav Křeček. His election as the Ombudsman is ‘only’ one particularly blatant example of how government and major institutions are systematically and intentionally politically decomposed and privatized step-by-step. The special-purpose coalition of ANO, SPD, KSCM, with the assistance of a part of the CSSD, gradually and systematically decomposes important democratic institutions that are supposed to control the rules and serve all citizens, not selected politicians,” said Million Moments in their press release.
“If it goes on like this, what happened in Hungary or Poland will eventually happen here. Justice, the media, government, and public procurement will be subordinate to politicians. In such a situation, we can no longer speak of completely free elections, because government politicians have completely different options than the opposition. Government politicians concretize in power by distorting the whole system,” said the chairman of the association, Mikuláš Minář.
On Sunday, the association will announce what events will take place in regional cities.
Křeček was elected for the position of Ombudsman, or Public Defender of Rights, on Wednesday. Critics of the former chairman of the Association of Tenants of the Czech Republic call him ‘the enemy of nonprofits.”
In the past, Million Moments has called for 19 demonstrations. Two of them were at Letná last year, both of which gathered over 200,000 people. Two hundred eighty thousand people met in June and 250,000 in November.
