15 hours after the start of the meeting, the chamber suspended debate at midnight on a coalition proposal for postal elections for Czechs living abroad, whose introduction was blocked by the opposition. After a night break it will resume again on Thursday at 09:00 AM. SPD opposition leader Tomio Okamura promises an elaborate performance. So far, there has been a spat between the opposition parties and the alliance in the discussion regarding the postal election. It was dominated by MPs ANO, STAN and TOP 09, who repeatedly argued in the form of two-minute comments, among other things, about the regularity of the amendment.
First, ANO MPs Jana Mragokova Vildumetsova and Berenica Bestova accused the coalition of submitting the amendment to the House of Representatives as a parliamentary proposal. “You put it on the pig here,” Pestova said. His colleague was annoyed that the next elections to the House of Representatives should be followed by the introduction of postal voting from next year. Interior Minister Vít Rakušan (STAN) justified this by saying that the guys have been waiting for the possibility of voting by mail for two decades and there is no reason to postpone it.
Mračková Vildumetzová blamed the coalition for not discussing the motion with the opposition. The president of the TOP 09 delegation, John Jacob, justified this by saying that ANO refused to support the possibility of introducing postal elections, even though the Andrzej Babis government also had it in its program statement. Member of Parliament STAN Ondřej Lochman noted that ANO was promoting “an open-air museum and the defense of our country” by rejecting it.
The Austrian, representing the supporters, recalled that the government had previously wanted to submit an amendment to the law including postal elections, but the opposition had insisted that postal voting should not be included, and the cabinet agreed. Even then, he warned the opposition that the federation would put forward letter elections as a parliamentary proposal.
You're as old as my son, you can't educate me, snaps Babis in Austria
Regarding ANO's objections that the proposal was not put forward by the government and did not go through the standard legislative process, the Austrian noted that a similar proposal by the previous government had been discussed by the legislature and the relevant commission. However, this is not a suitable argument for Pestova, because according to him, in the event of a change of government, the proposals of the new cabinet must be discussed again before being submitted to the House of Representatives.
The discussion sometimes turned into personal discoveries, in which even the president of ANO joined. “You are as old as my eldest son, so you cannot educate me,” he told the Austrian. In the past, 69-year-old Babiš has made similar statements to pirate MPs.
