On holiday: Czech presidential couple under fire for missing local elections

Some are already describing this as a political miscalculation that could easily backfire.

As expected, criticism has come primarily from Petr Pavel’s political opponents. But the president’s plans to be on holiday out of the country at the same time as the Czech Republic holds municipal elections this weekend, on October 9-10, has also attracted criticism across the political spectrum and among pundits and experts.

“It’s wrong that the presidential couple is not participating in the elections,” according to political scientist Michal Malý from Charles University. “We constantly hear that it is important to take part in the elections, that no elections are useless and that it is a celebration of democracy. And then the president doesn’t make time for it,” he told Novinky.cz.

According to political scientist Jan Kubáček, the faux pas can easily be used by his opponents in the future, including if Pavel decides to run for a second presidential term.

“When he himself is running, he considers it important. However, he’ll put elections in which he is not running on the back burner and give priority to his vacation,” Kubáček argued.

Under normal circumstances, Pavel and the First Lady would have voted for local councilors in Černouček, a small town of 300 people in the Litoměřice region where they hold permanent residence.

President Pavel will however not be in the Czech Republic, having reportedly visited a car rally in Morocco and planning a motorcycle trip until he resumes work on October 19. “The president regrets the scheduling error,” his office said.

But the controversy only grew after the First Lady Eva Pavlová weighed in on the issue yesterday, criticizing current electoral rules for not allowing Czech citizens to vote from abroad in the local elections.

“For the first time, the state has firmly set the date of municipal elections directly by law,” she wrote on Instagram. “At the same time, it has done nothing to allow people to vote more flexibly, not only from abroad but also from another place in the Czech Republic… If we want people to participate in the elections, we should also create the conditions for them to do so.”

Her statement, in turn, sparked a rebuke from Interior Minister Lubomír Metnar, who argued that “if the Castle wants to open a debate about online voting, let it say so openly. But we will not upend the entire country’s electoral system just because the president has planned a vacation on the election date.”

The issue has proved divisive. While some have called for online voting to be extended to municipal elections, others argued that the very nature of local elections – when Czech nationals as well as some EU citizens elect the representatives of the districts where they live and have permanent residence – is not suitable for online or postal voting.