My experience with running as a candidate in municipal elections

I'm on a backlog of things I've been meaning to write blogs about but I guess it's better late then never.

Over a year ago, I became a member of a political party with the intentions of bringing a more youthful perspective into politics and representing the interests of people my age. For a long time, I've felt like Czech politics were largely dominated by people over the age of 40 or 50, who obviously preferred to act accordingly to their interest and I believed that young people, like me, needed to get out there and not only vote, but also get themselves voted in.

And that's what my friend and I did. Us two, along with other people under the age of 30 from our city's party organisation outvoted the stale and not well received leadership of the said city party organisation and we appointed a new governing body, made up of young people as well as a few political "veterans" to offer guidance and advice. It wasn't that long from that point and we had to start working on the campaign for the 2026 municipal elections which took place at the start of October.

It was a great new experience – working on the graphic design of our campaign, collecting complaints and insight from the citizens, going out in public and debating with people, acquiring funding from supportive businesses and individuals, door-to-door campaigning, creating and writing posts for social media, etc. 

I especially liked how every one of our city's party organisation members could find something to work on during the campaign and that people's talents were utilised I'd say quite well.

Building the candidate's list is something that I feel like could discourage a lot of people. Everyone wants to be in the top 5, top 10 on the list, but that just isn't possible. A good combination of people, a strong, popular leader, and strong runnerups are needed. That's why I settled with no.19 out of 27. I did this to get my friend pushed to no. 10, since his grandfather was one of the founding members of the party in the 90's and people still remember the surname, the association. Anyway, the greatest thing about our candidate's list is that the top 10 was almost exclusively made up of people under 30 – all young people, with a clean slate and the will to work. We officially had the youngest candidate list of all the parties and movements running in our city's elections and I also somehow turned out to be the youngest candidate and I even made it into the local news for that reason.

As the elections were approaching, I had a fair share of people coming to me saying they'll vote for me/and or my party's list as a whole, saying that they're really happy that us young people are getting into politics, wishing us all the best, essentially all positive stuff, didn't really encounter any negative comments even from voters of rival parties, which was great.

The elections didn't turn out bad at all either. I skipped from 19th place to 16th thanks to the few dozen preferential votes purely for me (I got around 700 votes). Our party went up to around 19 000 votes altogether from the 10 000 in 2022, we got 3 seats in the city council, one more than in 2022, we got our name out there, we tried new things, we learned what's effective and what's not and we have a plan coming forward.

 We ended up in the opposition but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to do. Our elected councillors will do everything they can to improve the quality of life on our city.   I personally will be on the city's committee of public safety, representing the interests of my fellow firefighters and the safety needs of the citizens. I'm also newly in charge of organising commemorative events and writing posts on behalf of my party, in the coming days it's going to be the Veteran's day and the Day of Struggle for Freedom and Democracy on the 17th of this month.

Thank you anyone for reading this far!