Matej Páleník (29), Prague 7 — 2026 municipal elections

Main topics

01

Safety first

Protecting residents and public order must be a priority for every town hall. Yet in 2025 the current leadership of Prague 7 abolished the separate Security and Crime Prevention Commission and dissolved its agenda into a broadly focused committee for education, social policy and health. Abolishing the separate security commission shows the current leadership's irresponsible approach. With this step, Praha 7 Sobě made it clear that residents' safety isn't a priority for it. I'll push for restoring a separate security commission with a clear mandate: to regularly evaluate police data, residents' reports and findings from outreach services, identify problem spots, coordinate targeted measures with the police and then check their results.

02

Decisions based on data, not impressions

From my time at the OECD I take away a fundamental principle: a public decision must address a clearly defined problem, be based on data and have a measurable outcome. Only then can the real impact on residents be measured along the way, and measures that don't serve their purpose be changed or scrapped in time. This is exactly where the current leadership of Prague 7 is failing. After the traffic lights on Strossmayerovo náměstí were removed, blind and visually impaired people pointed out that safety had got worse, and a petition calling for a fix was even started. Despite this, the leadership keeps defending the original solution and refuses to take political responsibility for it. I'll push for every measure to have a clear goal and an evaluation date. If a measure doesn't work or harms people more than it helps, it must be changed or scrapped – regardless of who pushed it through.

03

Public space without experiments

The current leadership puts too much energy into interventions such as the blanket installation of parking bollards, and too little into the everyday care of public space. Yet it's overflowing bins, broken pavements and faulty lighting that show whether a town hall really works. When bins started disappearing in Holešovice, residents only found out the reasons after the fact, from the mayor's comments on Facebook. The town hall should announce changes in advance, clearly, and also to people who don't spend as much time on Facebook as the mayor. I'll push for the number of public bins not to go down but, on the contrary, to go up. The current leadership defended removing them by saying that some people misuse them for household waste. The town hall should deal with rule-breaking, not cancel services for everyone else because of it.

A few words about me

I came back to Prague after several years spent in London and Paris. I studied War Studies at King's College London and Public Policy at Sciences Po in Paris. After that I worked at the OECD for two years.

In the Task Force on the Digital Economy, I took part in preparing one of the most significant reforms of international taxation in recent decades – new rules for taxing the largest multinational companies, including digital giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook. In the Task Force on Tax Crimes and Other Crimes, I worked with police and tax investigators on developing procedures to fight financial cybercrime. Today I work as a software engineer.

I want to use this experience to make the town hall run effectively - with clear priorities, decisions based on data and accountability for results.

Prague 7 must not be run only according to the ideas of one political party. The town hall must serve all residents of Prague 7 – including those who didn't vote for its current leadership or don't agree with it. In my view, the town hall too often defends its own decisions even when it becomes clear in practice that they don't work. I want to bring real dialogue back into decision-making, along with respect for differing views and a willingness to change course when a measure doesn't work or harms people.

In Prague 7 I want to focus mainly on safety, public space and the quality of decision-making – areas whose results people feel first-hand every day.

The candidate's texts have been machine-translated from Czech.

Links and social media

@matejpale Facebook

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