Abstrakt
During the communal election period 2014-2018, the Czech Republic has experienced a previously unseen surge of governing coalition collapses at the level of municipal administration. Judging by the election results, these numerous coalition crises were caused primarily by the weakening of established parties, which appeared unready to fight the appeal of new political groups.
At first glance, the destructive variable of political group ANO 2011, officially founded only in 2012, is interlinking most of these coalition collapses. Comparing the number of documented coalition collapses and their impact, urban governments of statutory cities seem to be the ideal sample for thorough analysis.
Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present a unique comparative analysis of all fourteen Czech statutory cities that experienced a governing coalition collapse in the defined election period. The fact that ANO 2011 party links all these collapses is pointing towards a general assumption that coalition behavior of young inexperienced political parties has the power to "make or break" governments and considerably affect the development of a city, region or country.
The frequent and previously unexplored coalition collapses in the Czech Republic show that the length and quality of previous city-specific coalition-making and coalitionmaintaining practices is irrelevant when chaos is introduced by such an intervening variable. On the other hand, ANO 2011 entered Czech politics as an ideologically ambivalent party declaring openness and communication with all political partners.
Using official statistical and legislative documents and media research, this paper searches for the critical intervening variable using "two Cs" of comparison: 1) cohesion, 2) collision. The presented empirical evidence tries to make sense of the reasons and developments of the coalition collapses in the Czech Republic and discovers that the reasons are all based on the failure to maintain and establish internal and external political networks.
In the first stage such networks failed within the ANO 2011 party and in the second stage, they failed among coalition partners. ANO 2011 party emerges from the analysis as a party with an extremely high fluctuation of ambitious representatives and extremely low tradition of political conformity, respect for hierarchy and coalition loyalty at the municipal level.
With such a diagnosis, the inability to exist in a political coalition seems to be one of the defining features of the ANO 2011 party.