Jaroslav Faltýnek is full of surprises. When we met last year, he was preparing a big party to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. He welcomed me back to his office full of his original paintings in good spirits and was excited to share that he will be getting married in the summer.
It looks like you're excited...
You know what? I really am. We've been together for six years and I asked Martina to marry me last year. I believe that the time has come and it's the logical next step in our relationship. I feel internally that my girlfriend deserves it. Men usually don't want to get married or don't really think about weddings, that's more a woman's thing. My first marriage lasted twenty-five years, I've been divorced for fifteen, so this is no hasty move. We know and love each other, and we're both very excited about the wedding. We'll have family, friends, and acquaintances, around about a hundred people. I'm glad that we'll all get together again.
There are photos of beautiful paintings of female figures on your desk. Is that your work, do you still paint?
I paint actively, and you may have noticed that I've been trying new things. Female silhouettes now often appear in my paintings in vibrant colors. Who knows, perhaps the upcoming marriage is an internal source of inspiration. And I'm likely in for a nice exhibit in Slovakia this autumn. Before covid hit, we put on a joint exhibit of our paintings in Prague with Ladislav Kamenický, the former Slovak minister of finance, and we agreed to do the next one in Bratislava. I'm getting ready for that, repainting old pieces, things I don't like anymore. I believe that the exhibit will happen.
Last time, you also said that stepping down from high politics did you good. Has anything changed throughout the year?
Ever since I've stopped appearing in the media, things have been quite calm. Nothing major has changed; I'm working in the Chamber as a regular MP and serving as the vice-chair of the ANO parliamentary group. When its chairwoman Alena Schillerová asks me for advice, I gladly help out. Lately, though, she has been needing my advice less and less, she has come into her own in her role and is doing very well. She does things differently than I did, but she's also in a completely different position. Back then, we were in a majority government; today, we're the opposition. What we now need most is a constructively tuned Chamber when laws are being discussed. When a contentious topic comes up in Parliament, we use our rights as the opposition and we filibuster.
I assume you mean the "sleeping-bag fillibusters" where you spent several days protesting against the change in pension valorization...
Yes, it was necessary. The thing is that seniors were promised valorization specifically by law. We set up the system when we were in the majority government. But nobody had any idea at the time just what level of inflation we would be dealing with. In my opinion, the government should first make good on its promise and only then start dealing with the issue and perhaps amending the law. You know, it doesn't matter whether the government is left-wing, centrist, or right-wing, but every government should respect its seniors. They are the people who raised us, after all. They worked their whole lives, paying taxes, and the state should give back by providing them with a dignified retirement. It's not the seniors' fault that we have the highest inflation in Europe. People who are of working age can make a little something extra, but seniors are often not doing so well health-wise. Some of them are just glad to be able to take care of themselves, some can't even do that. And something like that can happen to a person as early as their sixties or when they hit seventy. I regularly go grocery shopping and I can see how expensive things are with my own eyes. But things aren't as bad in Spain, for instance.
Do you go to Spain to do your shopping?
No, no... [laughs] But we spend some time there now and again with my girlfriend and we noticed that basic groceries like pastry, milk, eggs, or butter are cheaper than they are here. It all stems from the baseline price of electricity. The Spanish capped it last spring at the euro equivalent of a crown fifty per kilowatt-hour. We only did that in autumn and at six crowns per kilowatt-hour, and it spilled over into all other services. Spain's inflation is now at four percent, ours is at sixteen.
What should be done about that?
I feel that we Czechs have a specialty – we're always coming up with our own way of doing things instead of looking at how it's done abroad. The French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and even the Germans capped electricity prices in time; we were sadly late. As the opposition, we have been calling for the need to lower VAT on food. Instead of doing that, one of our dear colleagues from the government is advising people to shop in Poland! Not a great piece of advice that, at least as far as Czech producers go. Our farmers produce top-quality products and they deserve for Czech citizens to buy them. Just today, I was out buying some meat and I found out that it's a repackaged piece of Polish chicken from Ukraine. And the list goes on.
On that topic, our close neighbors including Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia are not interested in Ukrainian grain but our government refused to implement such measures...
I've specialized in agriculture my whole life and I'm still a member of the agricultural committee. The shadow minister of agriculture Margita Balaštíková is now actively working on this issue and we often communicate on the topic. Ukrainian grain is a very peculiar matter. I've spoken on this to the president of the Slovak agricultural chamber, and he said that he doesn't understand Czechia's stance. It's not just about pesticides that are not allowed here and that haven't even been detected. There's another issue – the farmers. In Poland, for instance, this cost the minister of agriculture his job. Ukrainian grain was originally headed to Africa where their regulations are different. The grain that's normally transported over the Black Sea was supposed to only travel through Europe on its way there because of the war. Czechia, same as Slovakia and Hungary, is self sufficient when it comes to cereal production, it even exports grain. That's why we have been pushing the minister of agriculture to start dealing with this issue in the European agricultural council. It simply cannot stand for locally-farmed grain to rot away in silos! We're also planning a V4 meeting with the farmers.
What do you dislike about current politics?
I'm sad that the government considers everything that originated within the ANO movement to be bad. It's a great shame that the projects our government got off the ground have been halted by this one. And they were good projects, too. And all of that just because Babiš came up with it. The same goes for EET. The state is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and the government has decided to abolish the transparent EET system, which people have already gotten used to and invested money in. Numerous entrepreneurs were positive about EET because it helped them put their books in order. What's more, it brought billions of crowns into the national budget. And that is money that's missing for things such as pensions right now. But even so, EET had to go because Babiš was involved...
We will have the European Parliament election next year, then regional elections, and lastly the 2025 Chamber of Deputies election. Are you coming back to high politics?
Life has taught me to never say never. I'm not sure, we'll see. The ANO movement is close to my heart; I was there when it was established, and I played a part in building it up. So we shall see...
CV
Jaroslav Faltýnek (born April 28, 1962, in Prostějov) is the first vice-chair of the ANO 2011 parliamentary group and deputy chairman of the Chamber's Committee on Agriculture. In the past, he was also a member of the Olomouc Regional Assembly and a long-standing representative of Prostějov.
Following his graduation from the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of Agriculture and Forestry Brno, he started working as an agronomist in ZD Lešany, later moving up to the post of chairman of the Prostějov Chamber of Agriculture, and from 1995 he was a division director at the Prostějov Malt Plants. He also sat on the board of the Prostějov-based Tchecomalt Group as a deputy chairman and then went on to work for Agrofert in 2001.
Faltýnek entered politics in 1990, becoming a founding member of the Agricultural Party. He was elected a Prostějov representative, running on the same party's ticket. He remained in that position continuously until October 2018.
After the Agricultural Party was dissolved, he became a member of the ČSSD in 1995. Running on their ticket, he was elected to the Olomouc Regional Assembly five years later. In 2012, he left ČSSD and joined ANO 2011. A year after that, he was elected MP, defending his seat in the 2017 election.
Faltýnek likes to paint, play the guitar and grow bonsai plants. He is divorced and has two sons.
With girlfriend (and now wife) Martina.
Faltýnek's paiting titled "Women".
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