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The year is 2009, and a group of enthusiasts who want to found a Pirate Party in the Czech Republic are meeting in the Yellow Pump pub in Prague. It was there that many of them met Ivan Bartoš for the first time – the man who would lead the party for more than a decade and lead it to historic successes.
And who is now leaving with disappointment after the party has experienced a series of electoral defeats from which it will not and will not recover. The failure in the parliamentary and European elections at the weekend was completed by the defeat in the regional elections.
In addition, Bartoš doesn’t just end up at the head of the Pirates. On Tuesday afternoon, Prime Minister Petr Fiala proposed his dismissal from the government.
It will be a completely new situation for the Pirate Party. There has practically never been a time in their history when they had to manage without their long-time chairman.
Among the Pirates, Bartoš stood out from the start. “At that time, Ivan surpassed everyone by a steamer. Charisma, rhetorical skills. He had incredible energy,” Mikuláš Ferjenčík, a former deputy and one of Bartoš’s later allies, describes the beginnings with Bartoš.
“He was really further than most for the whole 15 years. He thought about it a lot, he just loves it,” describes another influential Pirate, businessman Jiří Hlavenka.
Another thing that interested Bartoš in the emerging “Ajťák” party was his professional career. As a specialist in information technology, he worked for well-known Czech and foreign companies such as T-Mobile or EMTC.
It all worked together a few months later when the fresh party elected him chairman for the first time. In the autumn of 2009, the pirates met in a rather seedy hall of a village pub in Albrechtice nad Orlicí in East Bohemia.
Most of them did not know each other personally until then – they guessed who was sitting opposite them from profile photos on the pirate forum. Ballots were collected in a crisper box in a pub without an internet connection. When the pieces of paper were added up, Bartoš’s name was on them.
Bartoš has led the party since then with one short break until today. The first emerging party became visible through various protests against laws related to the Internet or copyright.
The highlight was the demonstrations against the ACTA treaty, which, according to the Pirates, was intended to limit freedom on the Internet. It was at that time that the public first registered a then thirty-one-year-old man with dreadlocks in a sports jacket waving the flag of the Pirate Party.
The hardest moment ten years ago. Until now
The party under Bartoš’s leadership gradually began to collect the first small victories in the senate and municipal elections. But she placed her real hopes for success in the European elections in 2014. As the number one candidate, Bartoš organized a big campaign by pirate standards – only for the party to narrowly miss out on the European Parliament.
That’s when Bartoš resigned for the first time. “That was a really hard moment for Ivan, maybe the hardest if we don’t count today. He was completely exhausted at the time and decided to leave,” explains Pirates member Lukáš Černohorský. It was Bartoš who called him to temporarily take over the leadership of the party instead of him.
By the way, this is the time when Ivan Bartoš stopped drinking alcohol – which he likes to mention whenever he is accused of being a “junkie” as a supporter of the legalization of marijuana. And he got married too.
Bartoš soon recovered from the electoral failure – and began to put together the party’s media communication. Colleagues describe that Bartoš was one of the people who opened up the media team to outside advisers, for example marketing specialist Jakub Horák.
When he returned to the head of the Pirate Party two years later, the PR machine went into full swing. Under his leadership, the well-known “Let us on them” campaign was created. And the Pirates, with the aura of a protest anti-corruption party that doesn’t get away with it, got into the House of Representatives for the first time. And immediately with a great gain of 22 mandates.
“Bartoš was very friendly, he was able to open the party to new people. He took advice – at that time he respected that someone was an expert. And that’s why the campaign was successful,” Horák recalls today.
Hard not to like him
It is friendliness and the ability to win people over that Bartoš’s basic trait is mentioned by all the people around him. “It’s hard not to like him,” summarizes Mikuláš Ferjenčík. In addition, Bartoš has a very specific sense of humor, which sometimes backfires on him. Like when he once texted Andrej Babiš from a party asking if he could run for mayor in Prague for ANO. Babiš is still waving at her today.
Bartoš is the prototype of an extrovert who can talk to anyone. Although he does most of the talking himself, he is able to jump from topic to topic and tell one story after another with the cadence of a machine gun.
He talks enthusiastically about whatever he’s excited about at the moment – when he tried composting at home, he even brought earthworms to the MP’s office. When he started using the digital notebook, he showed it off to reporters at every opportunity.
However, there are problems with this. Bartoš often gets bogged down in details or is unable to complete things. And sometimes he is troubled – in a Cimrmanian way – by the inability to keep the idea or, on the contrary, to abandon it. Colleagues from the government, under the promise of anonymity, describe that when Prime Minister Fiala is represented in the government by Bartoš, the meeting takes several hours longer and often no one knows what the head of the Pirates actually wants to say.
Paradoxically, the unexpected success of the Pirates in the parliamentary elections in 2017 did not benefit the party. What until now seemed like a playful and fresh party, began to suffer under the influence of parliamentary functions. And the party gradually lost its protest tone.
Instead of Ivan “Let us on them” Bartoš in a shirt and with an accordion or behind the DJ desk, voters increasingly watched the head of the Pirates in a serious suit. People around the Pirates describe that the party gradually began to close itself off to voices from the outside – the Pirates divided functions, party members also started to make media strategies and lost themselves in technicalities.
Party in panic
Still, the 2021 election was expected to be a big success. The polls were so good that Bartoš looked at times in the campaign as if he was already training for the role of prime minister. But the already notorious circling of the Elders came and the Pirates fell to four mandates.
Practically since then, the party and its chairman have been reeling in problems and do not know how to get out of them. Gradually, the camp of opponents of both Bartoš and his work in the government grew stronger. And the difference between what the party leadership thinks and what the regional base thinks is also deepening more and more. This was fully demonstrated in the European and subsequently also in the regional elections.
Bartoš’s environment describes one more of his typical features, which, by the way, he has in common with Andrej Babiš – he is hardworking and wants to do everything. For example, Mikuláš Ferjenčík remembers how in 2012 they organized a festival for free music at Parukářka in Prague. “The organizer somehow got away with it. When Ivan found out, he began to build the stage himself, mainly so that it would be. And that’s how he pushed the whole party,” Ferjenčík describes.
But it was this characteristic of Bartoš that turned against him a little in the end. Whether in the party itself, or at the Ministry for Regional Development, where he took too big a bite in the form of digitization of construction management.
It is the failed digitization that scares the Pirates perhaps more than the lost elections. It touches the very core of the pirate identity as a party that can modernize the state.
“He takes a lot of it himself. As a result, it seems that the Pirate Party is only Ivan Bartoš. And that’s not good,” describes, for example, long-time party member and former MP Vojtěch Pikal.
“What would I blame him for not letting another one grow up next to him? So it’s not just him – we just haven’t been able to cultivate skilled people. But he may have pushed them into the background a little, because he is such a strong personality,” adds Hlavenka.
At the same time, everyone agrees that just changing the chairman will not help the party. “We have far more serious problems,” concludes Ferjenčík.
UPDATED. We have updated the text with the information that Prime Minister Petr Fiala proposed Bartoš’s dismissal from the government.
