In the spring, Pirates and Mayors were the favorites of the election, and Ivan Bartoš was asked if he was ready for the role of prime minister.
However, since the start of the campaign in May, the coalition has garnered criticism for the trespasses, and voters began to leave it before the summer. The decline in preferences continues until now.
Dissatisfaction is also heard from within the Pirates, according to them the campaign is very defensive. Experts claim that the two parties in the coalition have lost their own identities.
According to surveys, Pirates and Mayors have been experiencing a decline in voter support since the spring, when they successfully attacked the 30% threshold.
Current data from the Median agency give them about twenty percent preferences, ie third place – behind the ANO movement and the Together coalition. According to the STEM agency, only 18.7 percent of Czechs would vote for them in August.
A vicious fightback by Prime Minister Andrej Babis has dented PaS’s support. The billionaire premier has been busy warning the country’s older and more conservative voters that the progressive-liberal Pirates are actually an authoritarian neo-Marxist mob hellbent on forcing them to become vegan and share their homes with migrants.
“We cannot let them close down our freedom,” Bartoš declares. “Babis has completely changed the understanding of Czech politics – ethics and truth don’t matter anymore.”
“We will only be able to change a Czech political system that has been brimming with cynicism over the past 30 years – never more so than today – with a new approach that will help the population overcome their deep distrust of politics,” he adds.
It all starts by being truthful during campaigning, he argues. “If you don’t carry the baggage of lies and false promises, you can push things forward,” he states. “You have to set the standard.”
However, critics worry that such plans reflect an inexperience and naivety that is contributing to the decline in support for PaS.
They contend that the Pirates’ reaction to Babis’s attacks has been weak. There are also suggestions that, in a bid to avoid confirming Babis’s picture of them as Marxist monsters, the party has failed to respond robustly enough to recent attacks on the transgender or Roma communities. A bland campaign has been the result.
