PRAGUE - MPs and senators should be able to support only one candidate in future presidential elections. The amendment to the law on the presidential election, which will be discussed by the government on Wednesday, provides for this. People should then be able to sign petitions of civic candidates online. According to the interior ministry, the amendment responds to the experience of previous direct presidential elections and could be effective from 2026, so it would apply already in the 2028 elections.
The new regulation should explicitly establish the rule that MPs and Senators may support only one candidate. Until now, legal opinions have been divided on this issue. Neither the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) nor the Constitutional Court has yet ruled on the merits of the matter, but the SAC indicated in 2017 that it was leaning towards the interpretation that a legislator cannot be a member of multiple proposing groups, the draft reads. The Interior Ministry, which registers candidate lists, has so far defended the view that no such restriction arises from the Constitution or the Electoral Act.
If a legislator is a member of more than one group of petitioners, his signature on any of the lists will not be taken into account. Because Members and Senators may not know at the time of signing that another has signed multiple slates, Interior will promptly publish a list of the Members and Senators who have filed slates. Until the deadline for filing lists of candidates, which is the 66th day before the election, it will be possible for another MP or Senator to join a list of candidates and replace the duplicate signature of another legislator.
Those who wish to run on the basis of signatures will be given the opportunity to collect signatures via the internet in addition to paper forms. This will be done using an electronic petitioning tool that will be part of the information system anchored in the Electoral Administration Act. The electronic system will guarantee that all the signatories actually exist, that their details correspond to reality and will also avoid the threat of duplicate signatures.
The regulations will continue to require 50,000 signatures from citizen candidates, so there will be no need to amend the constitution. However, less information will be required on the petition, and people will not have to provide their permanent address. Paper petitions will only be checked until the number of signatures together with the electronic petition reaches the required 50,000 threshold. So far, the Home Ministry has been verifying the accuracy of the data on a random sample on each petition and further action depended on the error rate found.
The Interior Ministry did not allow several candidates, such as businessmen Karel Diviš and Karel Janeček, to run in last year's elections due to a lack of signatures. After checking for errors, Diviš was granted 49,884 valid signatures out of 63,210, while Janeček was granted 48,091 out of 74,208. Diviš was then returned to the NSS as one of the candidates. On the other hand, he excluded Denisa Rohanová because she was supported exclusively by members of the former Chamber of Deputies, even before the election was announced. Although the law did not explicitly provide for such a procedure, the court said it was not possible.
CTK/ceskénoviny/gnews.cz-JaV_07
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