Letter from Czechia: Motorheads Against Brussels

The most bizarre addition to the already deeply weird range of far-right political parties in Europe has suddenly burst onto the stage in Prague. From the most niche of all single-issue parties, the “Motorists” (officially “Motorists for Themselves,” and also known by their electoral code: AUTO) have provoked the largest demonstrations in the Czech capital since the 1989 Velvet Revolution and left the country without a foreign minister.

The Motorists first announced themselves with anger over bicycle lanes.

In a campaign during Prague’s municipal elections in 2022, Petr Macinka founded the Motorists on a two-issue platform: immediate closure of all bike lanes in the capital, and making rides on the Prague Metro free. The idea was that making the Metro free for cyclists would leave the roads free for car owners.

There were, however, other issues lurking in the background. “Fanatical extremists,” Macinka said, wanted to impose a 30-kilometer-per-hour speed limit in the city, an idea that he believed reflected the European Union’s extreme green agenda, crowned by a ruling that the EU must cease building cars with internal combustion engines by 2035.

This platform was an instant electoral failure. The mayor at the time came from the left-leaning Pirates party, part of a Europe-wide movement triggered by another niche party, the Swedish Pirates, founded to support the Pirate Bay, a major file-sharing website, in the name of internet freedom, but which has since become a kind of liberal-libertarian coalition. After the election, the Pirates had to go into a coalition, and the new mayor came from the right-wing Civic Democratic party. But with 2.3% of the votes and no council seats, the Motorists were nowhere in sight.

They gradually gained traction as they moved to a national level. With a few European Parliament seats putting them in contact with nationalist parties across Europe, they felt confident enough to stage a relaunch in 2024, this time as a national party seeking seats in the National Assembly.

That didn’t pan out particularly well, either, but they did get nearly 7% of the vote in the October 2025 elections, putting them over the threshold to get some parliamentary seats. This has mystified the experts. How can a party focused so narrowly on car ownership make it into government?

Some commentators suggest that car ownership is like gun ownership in the U.S. — a symbolic badge of masculinity. And it is true that Motorist voters are the most gender-unbalanced and also the youngest of all the parties on the Czech scene.  

“For many young men, the modern world feels incomprehensible, and those with lower levels of education often experience a sense of personal failure,” says political scientist Aleš Michal of Charles University. “In the world of social media, it becomes important for them to incline towards a strong figure who embodies success and serves as a benchmark of achievement.”

The role model in question is not the founder of the party, but the Czech manosphere influencer Filip Turek, already dabbling in politics as an independent member of the European Parliament and now the best-known and most popular Motorist member of the Czech Parliament. Turek is certainly a motorist with a small “m.” Forty years old and a former racing driver, he is a collector of and dealer in classic British cars, often photographed with his Aston Martins and Bentleys. He is also an internet star, with a tough-guy, straight-talking image and a large audience of young men.

His influencer-manosphere qualifications meant that he was the only Czech to be invited to President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year. He has also met Elon Musk, congratulating him on closing down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which, he said, was funding “mainstream media and green and rainbow NGOs.” He has since added Department of Government Efficiency talk to his schtick, and argues that his connection to Trumpworld means he deserves to be made foreign minister. It is this prospect that brought tens of thousands of people out into the streets on Feb. 7, with another large protest planned for Feb. 15.

A small single-issue party with 7% of the vote is able to offer ministerial candidates because the one-man party of Czechia’s new prime minister, Andrej Babiš, didn’t quite make it to a majority in Parliament. So Babiš formed a coalition with two tiny extreme-right parties, the Motorists and the equally weird Freedom and Direct Democracy. The latter is the one-man band of a Japanese Czech former garbage collector, Tokio Okamura, who has been made speaker of the Parliament as a reward for joining the coalition after getting 7.78% of the vote on a platform that combines anti-EU, anti-Islam, anti-George Soros and pro-Vladimir Putin politics.

Petr Macinka, founder of the Motorists, who wanted and got the post of minister of the environment, makes no bones about wanting to use this position to destroy the entire environmentalist project. In December 2024, he called the Ministry of the Environment “the main obstacle to the Czech Republic’s prosperity.” Babiš has appointed another seeming madman as minister of culture: Motorist Oto Klempíř, until recently frontman of J.A.R., a popular funk group, but at 62 needing a new gig. He has the unique qualification across the entire Czech political spectrum that in the 1980s he was an agent of the StB, the hated secret police of communist Czechoslovakia. A still more sinister figure is Martin Šebestyán at the Agriculture Ministry, who is clearly in the pocket of agro-chemical big business, and fits right into the destroy-the-environment agenda.

It was the Czech president, Petr Pavel, who put a stop to this spiral of insanity, saying that he was not prepared to appoint Filip Turek as minister of foreign affairs. His influencer past has come back to bite Turek: While clips of him making Nazi salutes and using racial slurs against Barack Obama and Meghan Markle may endear him to embittered young men, they don’t make the grade for head of diplomacy. For now, he has been appointed both honorary president of the party and “climate change commissioner” for the government.

At the moment, it looks like President Pavel is not going to budge, but Turek isn’t going quietly either. An interview (in Czech) with Czech Radio last week went like this:

Interviewer: According to the prime minister, the president is definitely not appointing you.

Turek: So, what I say is, our position hasn’t changed. The problem is with the president. There’s nothing more we can do with him.

Macinka, meanwhile, decided to stick with his boy and make a fight of it, forgetting that 93% of the country didn’t vote for him. He declared that he would take the post of foreign minister himself, as well as the environment portfolio. This lasted for about a week, and on Feb. 4, Prime Minister Babiš and President Pavel came to an uneasy compromise. According to the Czech Constitution, it is the president who is in charge of foreign relations, so they have agreed to handle this important function between them, cutting the Motorists out entirely. There is no love lost between Babiš and Pavel, though, and their first engagement together in Munich on Feb. 9 saw them operating two separate missions rather than some kind of double act.

There is, however, a less fantastic explanation for the rise of the Motorists than a sudden explosion in enthusiasm for car ownership. Macinka used to work for former Prime Minister and former President Václav Klaus, probably the country’s best-known living politician, who though retired remains a prominent anti-environmentalist and climate change denier. Macinka left the Václav Klaus Foundation to found the Motorists, and Klaus spoke at the Motorists’ relaunch, hoping they would stand against “progressivism, multiculturalism, genderism, globalism, and last but not least, environmentalism.” Both his foundation and the new party have relied on lavish funding from Pavel Tykač, a coal baron and one of the richest men in the country.

Both the national agenda of the Czech Ministry of the Environment and the European Union’s green agenda represent a direct threat to the profits of Mr. Tykač. But the new minister of the environment can be a big help. As part of the EU’s green agenda, billions of euros are provided to the Czech government for decarbonization projects. This money will now be under the direct control of the new minister of the environment, the Motorists’ founder Petr Macinka, who will likely provide it directly to the very people whose activity it is supposed to resist.