Martin Kupka.
Former ODS and briefly Czech government spokesman, Líbeznice mayor Martin Kupka has become transport minister. He replaced part of Karel Havlíček, who from January 2020 headed the transport ministry together with the Ministry of Industry and Trade. It would seem that the two-seat post of the Budějovice economist and the controversial businessman associated with the story that the programme Reporters called "Trade with hope" (the company Sindat and Eva Syková) was a fad of Prime Minister Babiš, who ran out of loyal people and had no choice but to merge something. But the truth is that the idea of merging these two ministries had already appeared earlier in the agenda of the forgotten party LIDEM. With the appointment of Kupka to head the transport ministry, everything is going back to the way it was - in transport terminology. Martin Kupka is known both as a successful mayor and MP, but also as the one who drove Petr Bendel out of the chamber when a recount of preferential votes was initiated at the end of 2017. It turned out that a number of Kupka's votes were not counted because his name was on the other side of the ballot paper. The Supreme Administrative Court's decision at the time to change the election results also had an appellate dimension. It is clear that serious errors in the counting of votes, especially preferential ones, could be numerous, and the election could thus be declared invalid in certain circumstances. For example, a one-sided printing or a multi-stage check could help. Martin Kupka promises 200 kilometres of motorways implemented during his announced four-year term in office. That figure does not sound very likely and will probably be lower in 2025. Still, the ministry's monumental building (formerly the headquarters of the Communist Party's Central Committee) deserves a new tenant who will focus exclusively on the pressing infrastructure deficit and not split its inventiveness and efforts across multiple disciplines.
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