Notes on recent elections The Czech presidential elections, January 2013: Towards a more powerful head of state? q Marek Rybá  r * Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Gondova 2, 814 99 Bratislava, Slovakia article info Article history: Received 16 December 2013 Received in revised form 13 February 2014 Accepted 14 February 2014 In January 2013, the Czech citizens elected, for the first time in the nation’s history, their head of state in a popular election. It constituted a departure from a long-standing tradition, dating back to the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, where the president was elected by the parliament. The indirect election of the president was also adhered to during the communist regime (1948–1989), and the Constitution of the Czech Republic, an independent state since 1993, also provided for the head of state elected by the legislature. 1. Background Over the last decade, there were at least six attempts to introduce a directly elected head of state into the Czech constitution; all of them, however, failed to get accepted by the parliament. Even though political parties were inter- nally divided over the issue, a constitutional amendment was finally successfully passed in late 2011 and early 2012, when both houses of parliament backed a compromise solution. This was by no means obvious: the lower chamber was controlled by a center-right majority led by the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), while the Senate was controlled by political left led by the Social Democrats (  CSSD). In fact, it was the weakness of these two main political rivals that was the most important reason behind the constitutional change. Both parties emerged considerably weakened from the 2010 parliamentary elections: The governing ODS lost more than 15 percentage points compared to the 2006 elections, and the leading opposition  CSSD suffered simi- larly, loosing over 10 percentage points in the same period (Stegmaier and Vlachová, 2011). As a consequence, the relative importance of other parties and their candidates had risen in the parliamentary arena and would have to be taken into account in an indirect election. Moreover, none of the two parties had an obvious presidential candidate, and both were internally divided. The founding leader of Civic Democrats, Václav Klaus, had been elected to the presidential office in 2003 and reelected in 2008. While in office, he left his party, became increasingly critical of its policies, and his coexistence with ODS-nominated prime ministers was rather complicated (Hanley, 2012). The sit- uation was even tenser among the Czech Social Democrats. In 2003, the party failed to unite behind its official presi- dential candidate and leader Milo s Zeman. Subsequently, Zeman officially quit politics but returned in 2010 as the leader of a newly formed leftist party that directly competed for votes with  CSSD. Even after that, however, Zeman enjoyed the political support of a considerable portion of  CSSD politicians as well as voters. Thus, by giving the chance to the voters to choose the new president, the two main parties tried to avoid further internal conflicts. Both parties also hoped to gain political points in the eyes of the citizens; some two thirds of Czech citizens were reported to support the introduction of a direct election. Social Democrats even included their commitment to q This work is a result of a research project “Institutional Performance in the New Europe” supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-0413-11. * Tel.: þ421 2 59244194. E-mail addresses: rybar@fphil.uniba.sk, marek.rybar@gmail.com. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Electoral Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2014.02.004 0261-3794/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Electoral Studies xxx (2014) 1–4 Please cite this article in press as: Rybá r, M., The Czech presidential elections, January 2013: Towards a more powerful head of state?, Electoral Studies (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2014.02.004