Milan Feranec has been a member of the ANO 2011 movement for ten years and has already gone through several election battles within its ranks. He is preparing for more and firmly believes that they will prevail, whether it is in this year’s regional election or next year’s parliamentary one.
Let’s start with elections that have already taken place, namely the European Parliament election. How satisfied are you with the results?
The results were very pleasant. These are generally elections with lower voter turnout, and ours here, in particular, are not very attractive. This made the victory all the more valuable. In sports terms, I would say we won an away game. This election also said something about the opinions of Czech voters on developments in the European Union. It was a kind of minor conservative revolution. Parties and movements that are more critical of the Union’s recent developments have won out. The coalition versus opposition battle ended in favor of the opposition, specifically with a 9????12 split in seats. These are all takeaways from this election.
Regional elections are coming in the autumn. Will you be involved in your region of Olomouc?
More symbolically, as moral support for our party ticket in one of the bottom places. Regional elections will be very important, and their results can significantly hint at how the 2025 parliamentary election will turn out. Since ANO 2011 is a dominant political force, we cannot be satisfied with anything less than victory in the Olomouc Region. And it must be a victory that will ensure that others cannot bypass us. In our region, a local version of the national five-party coalition (from the left to the right, from conservatives to activists) is in power. The governance is reflective of that.
You mentioned next year’s parliamentary election. Do you already have an idea of the country’s future direction if you become part of the government?
We are not a blank slate; we were in the government for eight years. Those were years of economic growth, and the standard of living increased for all social strata. We can build on successful steps and learn from less fortunate ones. And above all, govern differently than the current coalition. We aim not to increase taxes but to collect them diligently. And especially to avoid doing the opposite of what our platform says, as the current government coalition is so “successfully” doing.
A novelty for this election will be the possibility of mail-in voting. Your party, however, is quite negative about this option…
This law undermines the most valuable aspect of our electoral system, which is the high level of public trust in the election process, vote counting... I do not recall any serious complaints about fairness cropping up here in the past. Mail-in voting allows for the denial of basic principles, namely the privacy of voting and the personal exercise of voting rights. There are many points in the mail-in voting process where privacy may not be maintained, ballots can be lost during postal transit, and so on. The very possibility that one person can serve as a proxy for up to seven people when sending voting ballots undermines the basic principle that voting should be individual. Our legal system does not even allow proxy voting. It can truly weaken public trust in the fairness of elections.
In the Parliament, you are also part of the Subcommittee on Taxation, Customs, and Lotteries. When the word “taxes” is mentioned, most people probably shiver. Should we expect any more changes in this area?
I mainly hope that the current government will not increase any additional taxes. Like when the Ministry of Finance sent a draft amendment to the Income Tax Act for comments together with an amendment to the Accounting Act, where it quietly proposed to abolish the tax exemption on the sale of real estate that has been owned for more than ten years. When Ms. Schillerová pointed this out and it started appearing in the media, Minister Stanjura rather pathetically excused it as an idea of the officials, and said he had no clue that it was there...
Did the so-called government tax package help the country?
If you are a citizen who enjoys paying ever higher taxes, it helped you. But seriously – the consolidation package was originally supposed to be about savings, but it introduced very few savings on the government’s side. It brought the most extensive tax increase in roughly the last twenty years, over 70 billion crowns annually. Since 2023, state expenditures have exceeded two trillion crowns. We did not have such high expenses even during the COVID pandemic, where the state covered almost everything. I haven’t really noticed any of the promised savings. One possible positive is that banks paid next to nothing on the so-called windfall tax. It‘s positive only for those banks, of course, not for the national budget. And arms manufacturers, which are now thriving, weren’t even included in the windfall tax. For them, it has been positive without a shadow of a doubt. So, reductions of the deficit are being driven by higher taxes for the population and businesses. It must be acknowledged that the government was thorough in increasing taxes; everyone got higher rates, no one was spared. We could paraphrase Cromwell’s quote and say that, “A citizen cannot be sure of their property; the government cometh with the consolidation package.” It is good that the national budget deficit is decreasing, but it is shrinking due to higher taxes. So, I repeat – I hope the government will refrain from any further action in terms of taxation.
Let’s take a quick look at your city, Olomouc. What kind of city is it? And what does it need the most?
Olomouc is the former capital of Moravia and the seat of the archbishopric. We have the second-largest urban conservation area after Prague. We have many religious monuments (among others, the Basilica of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary on the Holy Hill, a so-called basilica minor). But we are not just a city of monuments; Olomouc is also becoming a center of excellent gastronomy, with several restaurants that are among the best in the country. We have a theater, a philharmonic orchestra, several major league sports clubs, an aquapark, a zoo, two universities... It is a beautiful city, and its size (over 100,000 inhabitants) is just right. Prague is too big for me and Přerov, for example, is too small. And what does Olomouc need the most? The completion of bypasses to reduce the amount of transit traffic through the city; otherwise, not much.
Transportation is a hot topic throughout the entire country…
I still follow transportation closely. It is great that a lot of construction is going on, such as sections of the D4, D6, or D35 highways. Minister of Transport Kupka is not a bad minister. Mainly, unlike other ministries, he did not bring about any staffing revolutions in his department and in investment organizations such as the Road and Motorway Directorate and the Railway Administration; he just let people do their work. It must be honestly said that the transport projects being initiated today were prepared during the time our minister Havlíček was still in office. And vice versa – the projects being prepared now by Mr. Kupka will be initiated by our minister, I believe.
Milan Feranec with his wife Miroslava.
VACATION
Regarding summer plans, Miroslav Feranec admits that the older he gets, the more conservative he becomes. “In recent years, we have been spending holidays in the Czech Republic. There are so many beautiful places and monuments in our country that one would need several lifetimes to visit them all. This year, we spent two weeks in the Třeboň region and are definitely planning to take some smaller trips.”
CV BOX
Milan Feranec (born January 18, 1964, in Snina, Slovakia) has been an MP for the ANO 2011 movement since 2017 and a member of the Olomouc Regional Assembly for three years longer.
He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Masaryk University. During his studies, he worked as a sales representative and later as a corporate lawyer. From 2002 to 2009, he worked as a manager at Agrofert Holding, and from 2011 he was the financial director of AGRO Jevišovice for a year, then he ran his own business.
In early February 2014, he was appointed the first deputy minister of transport and was responsible for the economy and European funding. A year later, the new minister transferred him to the position of a line deputy at the ministry. In June 2015, he became a deputy member of the Government at the Ministry of Transport, but he resigned from the position in November 201???? because of his newly-acquired seat in the Parliament. From 2014 to 2018, he was also a member and chairman of the Czech Railways supervisory board.
He is married and lives in the Hodolany district of Olomouc with his wife Miroslava.
