ANO deputy chair and Chamber of Deputies member Radek Vondráček called on 18 October 2026, after ANO's failure in the Senate elections, for a discussion of changing the Senate electoral system. In the programme Partie Terezie Tománkové on CNN Prima News he proposed, for example, single-round voting and said he is troubled by the low representativeness of the Senate, because in the second round a few hundred votes are sometimes enough for a seat.
ANO won no seat in the Senate elections and lost the only seat it was defending, even though 13 of its candidates advanced to the second round. Vondráček called the result a "slap", but according to him the best of the possible ones, because the elections did not change the balance of power in the Chamber of Deputies or threaten the governing coalition. He also called it a "wake-up call" that the movement must evaluate at its executive board. Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO) called the movement's result in the Senate and municipal elections catastrophic.
According to figures in the publications, 43.3 per cent of voters came to the Senate elections in the first round, and in the second round turnout exceeded 20 per cent; according to FORUM 24 it reached 21.22 per cent. Vondráček named the low turnout in the second round as the problem.
STAN deputy chair Karel Dvořák opposed the change, saying that the two-round system leads to a search for a middle path and the candidate is acceptable to a larger part of citizens. ODS deputy chair Tomáš Portlík also agreed with keeping the two-round system. Vondráček at the same time questioned the success of STAN, whose candidates won in ten of 14 districts.
Chronology
- — Radek Vondráček, a vice-chair of ANO, called for a discussion on changing the electoral system after the movement's setback in the Senate elections. iDNES.cz FORUM 24