European Parliament Elections

As an EU citizen living in another EU country you are allowed to cast your vote for the European Parliament here also (if you have already registered that is.) You could simply go for the party that is in the European fraction your national party would be in; there tends to be good consensus, but before you do, take a look at some other options. Here are some of the parties, what they stand for and in which camp they belong. We narrowed it down to a selection of the bigger parties, but officially there are 31-33 parties on the ballot. The number in front of the party name is their ballot party number; included to make ballot identification easier. In parenthesis is which EP group the local group belongs to.

There are several independent candidates that seem to have a chance (independent candidates were good for 8,2% of the votes in the last EP elections), one of them was the still popular former director of TV NOVA Mr.  Železný who is now with the Libertas party (1) and the still independent and popular Jana Bobošiková on the Suverenita list (5).

Since ODS, KDU and SNK are all part of the EPP-ED group, the actual changes in policy might not be that big or noticeable when consensus voting is done EP-group wide. Still if you would like more economically liberal policies ODS would be the one to go with; KDU if you want to see slightly more moderate and Christian policies and EPP-ED could be considered more moderate and slightly more progressive.

On the left, things are slightly more clear as the Green party is the most moderate of all (sometimes confusing for foreigners, as green parties in other European countries can be quite radical), CSSD your more typical social democrat party and KSCM is quite obviously the more radical left choice.

Surprisingly none of the current Czech parties represent the ALDE (FKA. ELDR); the third largest group in the EP. In case you are interested in voting for a party represented in the ELDR, you would be best off choosing one of the EPP ED parties.

“Remarkable” is the name of the right block, their party´s name is 133 words long thanks to a gap in the law which allowed them to get half their programme on the ballot paper. Critics however say they don´t really go beyond the 133 words. There has been some discussion whether or not the small parties really have a chance; this is partly because these elections are being used by the bigger parties more to fight each other at home than to really discuss European issues. The latest polls however indicate neither the Green Party nor the European Democrats will garner enough votes to make the cut.