Political marketers and the parties realized this during the Parliamentary elections campaign of 2021. The first campaigns aimed at young people were made by the centre-right SPOLU coalition, the liberal coalition and Pirates and Mayors. In the end, the SPOLU coalition managed to get young voters, which was the key element that enabled them to win the elections and form a government.
The major opposition populist party ANO tried to focus more on young people as well during the past 4 years. However, they decided to get young people on their side with trendy and bizarre videos more than real political ideas and solutions. This is why we saw a former minister of finance dancing on TikTok dressed as a French fry and a former prime minister talking to a chicken about Ukrainian wheat.
They thought that the younger generation is easy to manipulate, and we needed to show a clear reaction that they are not right. That’s why we, as the SPOLU coalition, decided to make the core point of our campaign for Parliamentary elections in 2025 that bizarre should not be part of politics, and we want the ideas and solutions instead.
The main message of Bez bizáru (in English "Without Bizarre”) was that young people are not stupid and easy to manipulate. We said that you also don’t expect your doctor to dance; you expect competence. We tried to innovate the way political campaigns are done, and we succeeded in this way. We had fresh visuals, and the campaign was really made by young people. We focused on social media but didn’t forget about the contact campaign as well, and organized roadshows throughout the country with a food truck.
But it wasn’t just about volunteers who helped the experienced colleagues. There were also thousands of young candidates from our coalition who wanted their spot in the parliamentary decision-making process. We can mention two of them, Štěpán Slovák and Lucie Bartošová from ODS, who were elected. This was thanks to the election system in the Czech Republic, with a high value of preferential votes.
Štěpán Slovák was 4th on the candidate list of SPOLU in the Zlín region. He is 27 years old. Before the campaign, he and his team had already created a strong programme for reform of the health care system, so the main theme of the campaign was clear.
In our research, where we can be different in the campaign, we also found out that people lack contact with their politicians, so we made the biggest political road tour in the history of the region. Štěpán visited every one of the 307 municipalities in the region. In every village or town, he did his contact campaign, and we made a video. This helped Štěpán become well known to the public, not just in the region.
The second candidate I already mentioned is 25-year-old Lucie Bartošová, who is from the Liberec region. Her main focus is on education because it is a topic she has been interested in for a long time, and she is looking for a reform of the system. This topic is something which young people feel every day because a large number of them are still in their studies.
We decided on a high presence on social media and creating reels focused on education and commenting at that moment on the political situation. For example, there was a series of videos with an MP focused on the same theme, education. The election showed that social media is a strong platform for today’s politics and decision-making, as people elect by their preferential votes.
In the elections, coalition SPOLU lost and is not going to be part of the next government. However, the young people vote for people who are closer to them and see the same problems that they see every day. Most people also want to see new, young, and fresh faces, which is something that our young campaign Bez bizáru massively helped.
The government also needs to come up with their own themes and agenda first. We were in a position where the agenda setting was on the opposition, and we ended up acting more like an opposition to the opposition. This outcome is also for us as young people; we focused too much on showing how politicians shouldn’t act and what they shouldn’t do, instead of showing our ideas as young campaigners, which was later balanced by young candidates.
Young people all over Europe are not stupid; they want politicians who will actually listen to them and see the same problems that they do. They want politics which show competence and are meaningful. In the Czech Republic, we showed that even young people can beat apathetic behaviour by humour, political messages, freshness and integrity, and we believe that in four years, we are going to be even more experienced to show it once more on the whole country’s level.
About authors:
Matěj Vybíral is 23 and studies political marketing at Masaryk University in Brno. Since 2023, he has worked for the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), where he focused on social media projects communicating government policies. He was part of the personal campaign of MEP Ondřej Krutílek in 2024 and contributed to the parliamentary campaign of Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský in 2025. In the same year, he played a key role in the youth campaign Bez bizáru.
Michal Mikulka is 19 and studies at an international American high school in Brno. He works with the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) at the local and regional level, helping elected officials and candidates with their communication. He participated in the 2024 MEP campaign of Ondřej Krutílek and several regional campaigns later that year. In the 2025 parliamentary elections, he contributed to five successful personal campaigns of newly elected MPs and now works as an assistant to an MP.
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