Czech local elections highlight the country’s thousands of small municipalities
In this special episode of Czechast, Vít Pohanka examines the history and future of one of the most distinctive and unique features of Czech public life: a country of fewer than 11 million inhabitants divided into more than 6,200 municipalities, each normally possessing its own elected council and mayor.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) comparisons place Czechia at the most fragmented end of local government in the European Union. The average Czech municipality has around 1,750 residents, compared with an EU average of approximately 5,300. More than four-fifths of Czech municipalities have fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. France and Slovakia have similarly fragmented systems, while Denmark has only 98 municipalities and Sweden 290. Why is that?
Villages shaped by the landscape
Social geographer Radim Perlín, who heads the Rural Geography Research Centre at Charles University’s Faculty of Science, says the explanation begins with the landscape and reaches back to the Middle Ages. The poorer soil of the hilly regions of Bohemia and the Vysočina could support only relatively small settlements, creating a dense network of villages.
“That is why, with a degree of exaggeration, there is a little village behind practically every little wood in Bohemia,” Radim Perlín says. “When people in Moravia say a small village, they mean 1,500 people. When people in Bohemia say a small village, they mean 200 or 250.”
When modern public administration emerged under Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the eighteenth century, each village acquired its own local authority. Over the generations, municipal independence became closely associated with local identity. Although many villages were incorporated into larger towns during the communist period, numerous communities restored their independence after 1989.
Polnička, with approximately 820 inhabitants, was once part of nearby Žďár nad Sázavou, a town of some 20,000 people. Its mayor, Marcela Jozífek Grochová, says independence allows residents to determine their priorities themselves.
“We draw up our own budgets, and we are closer to people. We can agree on what we will do, when and how, and for how much money.”
Pavel Štefan, mayor of the smaller village of Světnov, speaks in similar terms and points to a wastewater treatment plant built jointly with another small neighbouring village Škrdlovice.
“These are things that people in the village can decide on, rather than someone from, let us say, the town hall deciding for us,” he says. “People in the village decide for themselves.”
The system’s defenders say small municipalities give residents unusually direct access to elected representatives. Petr Drahovzal, mayor of Velký Osek and vice-chairman of the Union of Towns and Municipalities, rejects the argument that the arrangement unnecessarily burdens public finances.
“I will be frank: it is a completely misguided argument,” Petr Drahovzal says. In a small municipality, residents know precisely who is responsible “whether you can drive along a road, whether a streetlight works or whether, heaven forbid, there is an illegal dump somewhere. And I know whom to contact.”
But the government’s National Economic Council, known by the Czech acronym NERV, is not formally proposing the wholesale abolition of municipalities. Its member Aleš Rod says the central problem is that thousands of councils must make complicated decisions despite possessing very different levels of expertise.
“Whether it concerns education, waste, transport or putting public contracts out to tender, people have different levels of information and understand these things to different degrees,” Aleš Rod says. He also argues that municipalities could make some decisions jointly, tender for services together and share specialist officials without surrendering their local identities.
Keeping local identity while sharing services
Czech law already allows municipalities to establish voluntary associations and communities of municipalities through which they can share responsibilities. France offers a more developed example: small communes retain their mayors and councils while transferring some services to intermunicipal structures. terri.cemr.eu
Greater administrative cooperation, however, cannot change the physical settlement pattern. Radim Perlín notes that Czechia’s 6,200 municipalities contain between 12,000 and 13,000 individual villages and settlements. Sedlec-Prčice, for example, is administratively one town but consists of 27 separate local parts, some several kilometres from its centre. “Every two kilometres, behind every forest, there is a little village,” he says. “But that does not mean the mayor is based there, or that there are any services. It is enormously demanding, for example, for public transport.”
The debate is therefore not simply about whether Czechia has too many municipalities. It is about preserving the local identity and democratic accountability that small communities value while enabling them to share the expertise and services they cannot efficiently provide alone. To learn more, listen to special episode of Czechast.
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Czechast is a regular RPI podcast about Czech and Moravian culture, history, and economy.
