ANO has absorbed the anti-system parties. The former coalition hits a ceiling in poorer microregions, where turnout also rose
A regional analysis of the 2025 Czech parliamentary elections at the ORP (microregion) level, published the same Sunday evening as the results came in. It was the first complex analysis – rather than armchair commentary – to appear after the vote, and it sets out three closely linked findings.
First, turnout rose by 3.5 percentage points to 68.9 %, but the rise was concentrated in less developed microregions: voters in the poorest ORPs mobilised more than usual, though the persistent gap to wealthier areas did not close. Second, the former governing bloc (SPOLU, Pirates, STAN) retained its 2021 aggregate share of roughly 43 %, but hit a hard ceiling at around 30 % in poorer microregions – half of what it received in the most developed parts of the country. Third, ANO grew from 27.1 % to 34.8 %, and that growth came largely at the expense of the anti-system parties (SPD, Stačilo!): in the regions where ANO gained most, those parties lost most. The net effect was a consolidation of the opposition vote rather than a shift of the overall left-right balance, and a sharp drop in wasted votes.
The piece also pushes back on the common reading of the Sudetenland’s distinct voting pattern as a lingering cultural-historical effect of post-war resettlement. When socioeconomic development is controlled for, the Sudeten–non-Sudeten gap largely resolves into the same income, education, and labour-market gradients visible elsewhere in the country.
I did all of the data work on this piece – scraping, cleaning, the regional aggregations, and the correlation analyses. The article itself was written by Jakub Stuchlík, who sifted through the data and theses we had prepared in advance, decided on a story, and chose what to publish. Daniel Prokop contributed higher-level conceptual framing, including the Sudeten argument. Alena Šindelářová provided technical oversight on the data side – she runs data at PAQ, and guided the setup so we could move at that pace without sacrificing quality.
For me personally this was the biggest coding project I had taken on; it pushed my comfort with scraping, R, and more generally with building processes that keep data quality high under real time pressure. The piece also got substantial public attention – my first invitation to live morning-news commentary came out of it.
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