Markéta Šichtařová bet on Tomio Okamura after failing in the Senate elections. She criticizes the Green Deal and sustainability
Economist Markéta Šichtařová is a woman full of paradoxes. Despite calling people who want to enter politics psychopaths, she is running in this year's autumn elections. And although she failed in last year's senate elections, ending up only fourth in her electoral district, she proclaims her result in the battle with the victorious Jiří Drahoš was "absolutely luxurious". What are her chances of succeeding this time?
Šichtařová first came into the public consciousness when she became the main analyst of the Czech branch of Volksbank. Companies where her then partner and later husband Vladimír Pikora also worked, with whom she has as many as seven children.
Her economic commentaries were later utilized in her own company Next Finance, which she ran with him. Gradually, she built up contacts in politics and the media. She regularly published her contributions on iDnes, in Echo24, but also in Parliament lists or on the disinformation website AC24. As a proponent of political conservatism and classical economic liberalism, she also wrote several books and advised Václav Klaus Jr. when he led the Trikolóra movement.
It started with Motorists, continued with the fight for the Senate
In November 2023, she joined the Free Party. Since then, however, she has managed quite a lot. LP-Life revealed that she was promoting a party merger with the Motorists. However, they refused the offer.
She was also unsuccessful in her attempt to break into the Senate. Even that she bet on a personal PR card before the election did not help her, when she started telling Ona Dnes magazine about the dramatic circumstances under which her relationship with Pikora fell apart. She complained about allegedly being a victim of domestic violence.
"We were increasingly less allowed to leave the house and socialize with the outside world. I recall a scene where I'm standing on the stairs and he's yelling at me to wipe the railing with a handkerchief because it's radioactive. I was standing there, he was shouting at me and the children could hear. That was probably the moment when I realized that it's not just a so-called ordinary disease,"
said to the magazine.
Pikora responded with the following defense.
"I've heard many of the outrageous lies that Markéta Šichtařová used against me, securing a place in the media for her political career, even though their concentration today exceeds all limits. For the entire three years of our ongoing divorce proceedings, she has been trying to operate with these slanderous statements in court. However, nothing has been confirmed by either our children's testimonies or psychological assessments that I had to undergo during the divorce proceedings."
The media massage didn't work. In the Prague 4 constituency, she ended up getting only about 3.5 thousand votes and finished in fourth place behind the victorious candidate of the STAN movement Jiří Drahoš.
She then stated on social media in response to the result that this would greatly simplify her life.
"You know, only psychopaths really long to enter politics,"
she explained.
However, several months later she considers her candidacy to be the right decision.
"My result in a duel with the ultra-progressive Drahoš in ultra-progressive Prague 4 was absolutely luxurious,"
Šichtařová wrote to our editorial office.
Lean towards SPD
After these losses, she saw a figurative light at the end of the tunnel precisely in the shift towards SPD of Tomio Okamura. She probably realized that an independent candidate of the Free Ones would not stand a chance. As she claims, the result of the Senate elections led to her reportedly being catapulted from zero to the role of the national electoral leader of the Free Ones and a joint candidate of the SPD supported by the Free Ones, Tricolors and Pro.
"I was one of those who advocated this connection from the beginning. I made my willingness to become the leader of the Free contingent on this connection happening. I am convinced that the situation has already gone so far that we must forget about disagreements between opposition parties and unite all parties capable of communicating as much as possible to pull at one end of the rope."
She became the number one candidate of the SPD for the Prague list. For her major issues, she chose environmental protection and sustainability, namely the Green Deal and ESG.
"This is indeed the primary cause of the destruction of our standard of living, increasing food prices, expensive energy, unaffordable housing. That's the key to rectification. And that's what drove me into politics,"
she told the editorial board. And because she is running in the metropolis, she pointed out how she sees current life here.
"Transportation in Prague is a total disaster, housing is unaffordable, normal people have trouble paying bills. And maybe 80 percent of this is due to the mentioned ESG and Green Deal, because that's where regulations start, which then pass into, for example, increasing housing prices."
In the event that she would make it to parliament this time, a rather paradoxical situation may arise. Although it is not very likely according to preliminary surveys, in a certain constellation, she would meet in the deputies' benches with her ex-husband, who is the number one candidate of Motorists For Themselves in Ústí region. This could possibly give them more shared time to figure out who lied and when maybe even told the truth.
Sources: author's article, own questioning, CNN, ČTK, Ona Dnes
