At the height of negotiations on a future new government, which should include representatives of five political parties, including Pirates and Civic Democrats (ODS), Pirate Prague mayor Zdeněk Hřib targeted ODS MP Marek Benda. Hřib denounced Benda’s several-year-old statement that permitting divorce was a mistake.
“We will do our best against returning to the Middle Ages,” the Pirate Mayor of Prague, Zdeněk Hřib, responded to the election of MP Marek Benda as head of the Prague ODS.
According to Hřib, Benda is an extreme conservative who wants to ban divorce. He referred to a three-year-old interview in which the longest-serving MP said that permitting divorce was a historical mistake.
“The Prague ODS has elected a chairman who wants to ban divorce. Congratulations to Mark Benda, and we promise to do our best against returning to the Middle Ages. I am glad that the Prague ODS is no longer hiding its extremely conservative direction,” the Prague mayor wrote on Twitter.
Although Benda does not campaign for banning divorce, in a more than a three-year-old interview with Reflex magazine, he admitted that the introduction of divorce was, in his opinion, a mistake.
“It was a mistake to introduce divorce 60 or more years ago. Suddenly, the thing that was the exception became the norm. I don’t want to continue with this,” he said.
Benda also admitted that it would probably not be possible to ban divorces at the moment.
“I know it would be difficult to make this happen today. I am just saying that divorce is a fundamental mistake because the exception has become the law. And I don’t want exceptions to become the norm,” Benda explained.
The Deputy Mayor of Prague 2, Alexandra Udženija from ODS, responded to Hřib.
“Given that Prague has been sinking deeper and deeper in the Smart City index for the last two years, and Moscow has overtaken us in the digitization that is Zdeněk Hřib’s domain, I might be afraid of that ‘return to the Middle Ages.’ Let’s hope we will not have to start using torches soon,” she wrote on Twitter.
