Ondřej Kolář (born 13 March 1984) is a Czech politician and lawyer who has been a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic since 2021. He was mayor of the Prague 6 district from 2014 until 2022.[1] According to the Phoenix Research survey, Kolář was the second-most popular mayor of Prague in 2017.[2]
In April 2017, Prague City Hall paid 50,000 CZK for Kolář's interview in the men's magazine Playboy, which did not escape the attention of the media.[5]
On 13 May 2017, Kolář attended the unveiling of the foundation stone of the future monument to Maria Theresa of Habsburg in Hradčany, stating: "Marie Theresa is the only woman who ever sat on the Czech throne, and therefore she deserves such a monument."[6] The commission for the statue of Maria Theresa by Prague 6 cost almost 4,000,000 CZK.[7]
On 18 April 2018, Kolář filed a criminal complaint against himself, stating: "As soon as we approved in the council in 2016, the termination of the disadvantageous contract by which Prague 6 releases Poliklinika Pod Marjánkou to a private individual, we were criticised that the termination was poorly-executed that we paid severance pay without authorization."[8]
Kolář arose the initiative to add an information board to the monument to Soviet Marshal Konev in Prague 6. The ambassadors of Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan objected to the plaque.[9] According to Embassy of Russia, Prague, Konev did not take part in the invasion in 1968 and, due to his age, had already left commanding positions in the armed forces of the USSR.[10][11]
In August 2019, Kolář declared that he sympathized with the vandals who painted and poured red paint on the monument to Marshal Konev in Prague, and would not let the statue be cleaned.[12]
2020s
In the 2021 Czech parliamentary election, Kolář ran as a member of TOP 09 in the fourth place candidate of the Spolu coalition in Prague. Thanks to 27,259 preferential votes, he finally finished fifth and became a member of parliament.[13]
In the 2022 Czech municipal elections, Kolář ran for the council of Prague 6 from the third place of the TOP 09 candidate. However, he finished first and thus defended the mandate of the district representative, but no longer defended the position of mayor.[14] Kolář served as an opposition representative in the Prague 6 council, but resigned from the mandate in November 2023.[15]
In the 2024 European Parliament election, Kolář ran as a member of TOP 09 on the sixth place candidate of Spolu coalition with Civic Democratic Party and KDU-ČSL.[16] He received 31,623 preferential votes and became an MEP.[17] On 14 June, Kolář resigned as a member of the Chamber of Deputies and was replaced by his party colleague Martin Dlouhý [cs].[18]
Although Kolář claimed before the elections that the municipal council of Prague 6 uses "mainly our in-house lawyers and we only need help from the outside in exceptional cases", the law office of Petr Kubíček, Kolář's classmate from the Faculty of Law in Plzeň, prepared a total of 12 legal opinions that costed 844,035 CZK in August 2019.[20] According to the lawyers, the legal analyses they were by several of Kolář's former classmates were overpriced.[21]Aktuálně.cz found out in March 2020 that the law office of Petr Kubíček from Prague 6 received almost 340,000 CZK for two legal opinions, which are plagiarised.[22] Kubíč's analysis was created almost two months before the official order from the town hall, while Kolář refused to spread this fund.[23]
Kolář tried to legally force the opposition representative Jiří Hoskovec to delete a Facebook comment, stating: "Ondřej Kolář took lucrative city plots to Cyprus through the company SNEO, from which he removed all his opponents." Chairman of the representative club Pirates in Prague 6 Ondřej Chrást demanded Kolář's resignation in December 2019 because Kolář allegedly behaves "like a Russian governor" and intimidates the opposition.[24]
In March 2024, in an interview with CNN Prima News, Kolář called former Minister of Foreign Affairs Lubomír Zaorálek "vulgar".[25] Zaorálek later demanded an apology from him.[26]
