The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) will not be represented in either house of the Czech parliament for the first time since the formation of the Czech Republic in 1993. The party failed to get the five percent threshold needed to retain seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The SPOLU alliance won the highest vote in the election, topping ANO and incumbent Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. They have already signed an agreement with the Pirates/STAN coalition, third in the election, on forming a new government.
For the Communist Party, the results are bitter if not unexpected. Voter interest in the party has been on a sharp decline over the past decade, and the KSČM failed to gain seats in the country's upper house, the Senate, in 2018 or 2020.
In 2017, the Communist Party won 7.8 percent of the vote in the Czech legislative election, the first time it had fallen below 10 percent. But the party gained relevance after forming a controversial coalition with winning party ANO, which was enough to give ANO a ruling majority in forming the Czech government.
For some, the alliance with center-right populist party ANO may have been a final straw. The Communist Party took just 3.6 percent of the vote in this weekend's election, and have now lost their seats in the Czech Chamber of Deputies, the country's lower house.
It will be the first time since 1925 that a communist political party is not represented in the Czech parliament from the overall history of the former Czechoslovakia.
Comments