Political Parties

The chapter aims to map how Czech political parties worked with ideologies and roles in their electoral programmes and whether they changed after the migration crisis. In general, the events linked to the flow of refugees heading to European countries did not significantly impact the positions included in the electoral programmes of the political parties under study; the exceptions in this respect, however, were Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD, Svoboda a přímá demokracie) and partly also Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO, Akce nespokojených občanů). In the 2019 European elections, ANO was then more critical of the EU than before, and the migration crisis was one point of this criticism. For the SPD, the Sovereignist Reformer was a key position. Their anti-immigration stance was the primary source of their negative perception of the EU and defined their positions towards the Union and Czech foreign policy in general.