The chairman of the TOP 09 parliamentary faction, Miroslav Kalousek, defended the implementation of the proposal by saying that it was budget irresponsible. “It’s like ordering five servings of sirloin at a restaurant, and if a waiter brought you the fourth, you’d tell him you didn’t have to pay, but you’d do your best not to eat all five.” said the founder and former chairman of TOP 09 at the council counter. According to him, this government proposal is most reminiscent of a scene from the flying circus of the British comedy group Monty Python.
It is quite expected what the reaction of the governing parties will be. He will call the opposition maneuver, due to which the proposal cannot be discussed in an accelerated procedure, which was a basic precondition for pensioners to receive this money later this year, to be antisocial. After all, Jana Pastuchová from the ANO movement reacted in a similar tone to the TOP 09 and ODS maneuver, which proposed shortening the item under discussion in committees by thirty days. The opposition had previously criticized the proposal, saying it was a populist election gift, allegedly a veil. For example, the chairman of the ODS parliamentary club, Zbyněk Stanjura, said that he was most annoyed by his one-offness. “If you could come up with the idea that you want to valorise your pensions, it would be fair and we could debate that,” he said.
“One million old-age pensioners have a pension below fourteen thousand crowns a month,” Jana Maláčová from the CSSD reacted earlier to criticism of the opposition by the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs. In her introductory remarks, she emphasized that the proposal was an absolute priority for the government. “Let me just remind you that when we took over the government in 2014, the average old-age pension was eleven thousand crowns. That means more than 4.5 thousand less than the average pension in a few weeks. “
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