The left has vanished, ANO votes in cities, the Christian Democrats have the most councillors. A look at Czech municipal elections
A comprehensive analysis of Czech municipal elections, built on candidate- and councillor-level data from Volby.cz covering every round since 2002. The piece works at two levels: diagnosing a serious structural problem with local democracy in small municipalities, and mapping the very different political geographies of the major Czech parties at the municipal tier.
The most striking structural finding is the scale of non-competitive elections. In almost a third of Czech municipalities, voters receive only one candidate list – in half of those they cannot even reorder candidates through preference votes. Over 700,000 people live in municipalities where casting a ballot cannot change the composition of the council; that number has more than doubled since 2010. The problem is spreading from the smallest villages into municipalities of 500 to 2,000 residents, and at the 2022 elections roughly 17,000 additional candidates would have been needed nationally for every seat to have at least two contenders.
Independents dominate the overall picture. Only one in five municipal councillors is nominated by a political party. But parties still represent roughly half of the Czech population at the local level, because their seats are concentrated in larger municipalities where each mandate covers far more residents. A Sankey-style view of councillor flows since 2002 shows independents steadily absorbing seats from every party – not through churn into a new political formation, but through a generalised retreat of party politics from small-municipality life.
The collapse of the Czech left at the local level is the sharpest party-level finding. KSČM has lost 93 % of its municipal councillors since 2002 and ČSSD 89 %. Both the candidate pool and the electoral success rate have fallen in parallel: a ČSSD candidate had a 25 % chance of winning a seat in 2002 and a 16 % chance in 2022; for KSČM the corresponding number is 6 %. Left-wing candidate lists are also visibly ageing – the average KSČM candidate is 14 years older than the national average for municipal candidates – with no meaningful generational replacement.
ANO and ODS are both urban parties, but in different ways. ANO is almost absent below 8,000 residents (under 1 % of council seats) and strongest in regional capitals and larger cities, where it takes roughly a third of seats. ODS is also city-weighted but has a broader spread across municipality sizes, including a real presence in towns of 2,000–8,000 where it outperforms ANO by roughly three to one. Neither party has built a genuine small-municipality base.
The most surprising finding for most readers is probably that KDU-ČSL – the Christian Democrats – hold the largest number of municipal mandates in the country. Two-thirds of their seats are in Moravia, and their strength is unusually consistent across municipality sizes below the largest cities. They have also managed generational replacement better than any other party: their average candidate age sits exactly on the national mean. Their weaker performance in larger cities means they represent fewer residents overall than ANO or ODS, but in terms of raw council mandates they have been the country’s largest party since 2014.
This was the first mid-sized project I led from beginning to end, and I am very happy with how it came out. I did the data work and the overall conceptual framing. Thanks are due to my co-author Jakub Stuchlík, who was the main sparring partner for the analytical decisions and did a great deal to turn the final text into something readable for a general audience.
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