Mayor of Ostrava Tomáš Macura at the ceremonial opening of the new campus of the University of Ostrava, February 13, 2023, Ostrava.
Ostrava/Prague – Ostrava Mayor Tomáš Macura has announced that he has decided to end his membership in the ANO movement as of today. Given that he was elected to the head of the city for ANO, he will offer the position of mayor available to the representative club. Macura said on Twitter that he cannot accept the direction of the movement, which he says is completely different from when he joined it. At the same time, he lost faith that he could change anything about it, so he decided to end his membership in ANO.
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“However, I respect the fact that I was elected mayor for ANO, so I will offer my position at the representative club and let my colleagues decide who they want to lead them,” wrote the mayor of Ostrava.< /p>
When asked by ČTK, ANO leaders said that they expected Macura's decision. Unlike him, however, he does not think that the politics of the movement would fundamentally change. ANO vice-chairman Karel Havlíček said that he was not surprised by Macura's decision, he respected him. He believes that the movement did not fundamentally change its policy, it just had to respond to current developments, whether during the pandemic or at the present time. “The essence is not that he could not promote his ideas, but that he did not convince the other members of ANO and, according to the reactions of the last weeks, neither our voters,” said Havlíček to Macura's address.
The chairperson of the ANO parliamentary club, Alena Schillerová, also expected that Macura was moving towards such a step. “On the other hand, I don't really understand what has changed in the politics of the ANO movement in the past few months. In the fall, he ran as the leader of the ANO movement in Ostrava,” she added.
Macura leads Ostrava as mayor for the third term, he was elected for the first time in the fall of 2014. He joined the ANO movement in 2017. He had been at odds with the national leadership of the party for a long time. In the January presidential election, he did not support his party leader, Andrej Babiš, but announced that he voted for his opponent and eventual winner, Petr Pavel. He explained this by saying that, according to him, Babiš does not have the prerequisites for the presidency.
The Moravian-Silesian governor and then vice-chairman of ANO Ivo Vondrák, who last week resigned from the leadership position of the movement, behaved in the same way. At the same time, he suggested holding a ANO program conference on the further direction of the movement. He then stated that he wants to remain a member of ANO, which he has been like Macura since 2017.
