What happened at the Castle. ANO has a new version of why it agreed with Pavel after the pension negotiations

Representatives of the ANO movement Karel Havlíček and Klára Dostálová offered a new argument in Sunday’s TV debates regarding the controversial meeting at the Castle. Both stand by the fact that at the meeting of the president, the coalition and the opposition, no agreement was reached on the need to increase the retirement age, as the president claimed at the subsequent press conference. The fact that ANO did not contradict the agreement in any way immediately after the meeting, Dostálová and Havlíček are now explaining by being polite to the president, who, according to them, “unhappily interpreted” the conclusions, this was heard in the program Za five minut twelve on TV Nova and in the Party of Terezia Tománková on TV Prima.

The meeting at Prague Castle took place on March 28. Pavel then announced at a press conference that everyone agreed that the retirement age would have to be raised in the future. However, ANO subsequently denied the agreement. Another meeting in the same format was supposed to take place this week on Monday, however the opposition movement canceled its participation. It was justified by the fact that some representatives of the government, led by Fiala, intend to push through the reform regardless of the opinion of the opposition.

Klára Dostálová, MP and leader of the ANO European candidate, came up with a new explanation for why ANO did not contradict the president’s words in a discussion on CNN Prima News on Sunday. “It couldn’t have been expected, even if she (Vice President Alena Schillerová) didn’t like the president’s statement, that she would get behind the microphone and tell the whole nation that the president might have lied. She said it diplomatically. She told all the journalists immediately afterwards that there was no consent,” she said.

A similar explanation was heard a moment later on TV Nova from the mouth of the first vice-chairman of the movement Karel Havlíček. He described the fact that ANO Vice-President and Head of Deputies Alena Schillerová did not clearly oppose the President’s claim of agreement at the briefing as a “matter of decency”.