---
title: "Prague protests a plan to swap the TV licence fee for a government cheque"
description: "Babiš’s coalition wants to fund Czech public TV and radio from the state budget, at about 15% less, and passed the bill’s first reading at 4:36am"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-25T23:29:13Z
modified: 2026-10-26T00:09:05Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/prague-protests-a-plan-to-swap-the-tv-licence-fee-for-a-gove-eb8629
language: en
tags: ["politics", "media", "czech-republic", "babis", "press-freedom", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Prague protests a plan to swap the TV licence fee for a government cheque

*Babiš’s coalition wants to fund Czech public TV and radio from the state budget, at about 15% less, and passed the bill’s first reading at 4:36am*

By Nate Ledger · October 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/prague-protests-a-plan-to-swap-the-tv-licence-fee-for-a-gove-eb8629

## In brief

- Thousands protested in Prague on Sunday against a bill to scrap licence fees for Czech Television and Czech Radio
- The bill passed its first reading at 4:36am on Saturday after the ANO-SPD-Motorists coalition added it out of schedule
- Czech TV would get 5.74 billion crowns and Czech Radio 2.065 billion from the budget, about 15% less than under the fee
- Public broadcaster staff plan a one-day strike on November 3, and organisers have called a bigger protest for November 15
- President Pavel criticised the overnight vote, and the opposition plans to go to the Constitutional Court and European Commission

Thousands of people filled the streets of Prague on Sunday to demand that the government drop its legislation on public media. The bill would end the household licence fees that pay for Czech Television and Czech Radio and fund both from the state budget instead. As [Al Jazeera reported, citing AFP and AP](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/25/thousands-protest-in-prague-against-public-media-funding-reforms), the demonstrators accuse Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and his coalition of choking off press freedom. The figure everyone agrees on is a number of the clock, not a crowd count. The chant was “4:36.”

That is the time the bill cleared its first reading in the Chamber of Deputies, early on Saturday morning. The ruling coalition of ANO, SPD and the Motorists had moved the bill onto the agenda out of schedule, on a motion from SPD parliamentary group leader Radim Fiala, and sat through the night until the vote, [according to Radio Prague International](https://english.radio.cz/government-bill-abolish-license-fees-public-broadcasters-approved-first-reading-8900873). Several hundred people protested outside Parliament overnight, and police stopped some who tried to force their way in. Sunday’s rally on Old Town Square, called Hands Off the Media and organised by the Million Moments for Democracy association, was the bigger and calmer follow-up. Its main organiser, Mikuláš Minář, [told the crowd](https://english.radio.cz/thousands-protest-prague-against-plans-abolish-public-media-fees-8900930): “You’ve gone too far, we won’t let this country be destroyed.” He also offered a theory of legislative timekeeping: “It is mafia syndicates or the Soviet Politburo who make decisions at 4:36.”

Accounts of the crowd vary. AFP put it at several thousand, Getty photo captions described tens of thousands, and one Ukrainian outlet reported hundreds. The organisers have planned a larger demonstration for November 15.

## What the money actually does

Here is the mechanism, because it is the whole fight. A licence fee is a strange little tax. Households pay it, it goes straight to the broadcaster, and the government never handles the money. A budget allocation is a line in the state budget, which the government of the day drafts and Parliament passes. Under the first system the broadcaster has its own revenue. Under the second it has a grant.

The government’s answer is that the grant would be generous and safe. Culture Minister Oto Klempíř has described the annual amount as fair and predictable, and says it would be indexed to inflation and paid monthly, [according to Radio Prague’s report on the cabinet’s approval](https://english.radio.cz/government-approves-bill-abolishing-television-and-radio-license-fees-8889540). He has also told MPs that this funding model is standard in Europe. The numbers: Czech Television would get 5.74 billion crowns next year, which is one billion less than it expects to collect in fees this year. Czech Radio would get 2.065 billion crowns, roughly 400 million less than its expected fee income.

Add those up. The broadcasters would get about 7.8 billion crowns, against roughly 9.2 billion expected under the fee. That is a cut of around 1.4 billion crowns, or about 15 percent, which matches the government’s own figure. So the bill does two things. It moves the money from one pipe to another, and it shrinks the flow by a sixth or so.

The government also sells this as a way to cut household costs, and that is literally true. People will stop getting a separate bill. But the 7.8 billion crowns does not appear from nowhere. It comes out of the state budget, which is funded by the same households. The real saving to the public is the 15 percent cut, and the cost of that saving is less public broadcasting. The rest of the “saving” is the same money being collected under a different heading. You could reasonably call that a campaign promise kept, and Babiš does: he says abolishing the fee is exactly what he promised voters, denies trying to control the media, and accuses the opposition of exploiting the issue to raise tensions.

The opposition, the protesters and the people who work at the broadcasters are less worried about the pipe itself than about who controls the valve. A statutory amount indexed to inflation is fine until a future majority amends the statute, and a majority that can put a bill on the agenda without notice and pass it before dawn can probably manage an amendment. Staff at Czech Television and Czech Radio say they asked for legal guarantees against political pressure. Those guarantees were not added, so they have [called a one-day strike](https://english.radio.cz/public-broadcasters-announce-strike-action-protest-governments-plans-abolish-8900857) for Tuesday, November 3.

## Who else objects

President Petr Pavel said the surprise scheduling and the overnight weekend vote undermined confidence in the government’s good intentions and raised serious doubts about its motives. The European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the International Press Institute have all criticised the plans. The opposition calls the bill a step towards state control of both broadcasters, and it plans to take the way the first reading was forced through to the Constitutional Court and the European Commission.

None of this is new. When tens of thousands [protested against the new government in March](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/tens-of-thousands-of-people-in-prague-protest-against-new-government-of-czech-prime-minister-babis), the media funding plan was already one of the complaints. The bill still has a long way to go: committee work, further readings in the lower house, then the Senate and the President. One analysis by Seznam Zprávy suggested the opposition’s best hope is to use committee work and the second reading to add safeguards that keep the state payments away from direct political influence.

There is an awkward footnote for the opposition. Two of its parties, the Pirates and ODS, [once proposed scrapping the fee themselves](https://aroundprague.cz/en/news/politics/pirates-and-ods-once-proposed-scrapping-the-ct-and-cro-fee-themselves), as the local site AroundPrague pointed out. That partly explains why the argument has moved on from whether the fee should exist to how the bill was passed. Hardly anyone in Prague is defending the licence fee as a thing to love. What they object to is a government that cuts its broadcasters’ budgets by a sixth, writes them a cheque in place of the fee, and holds the decisive vote at 4:36 in the morning.