Turnout in this year's Czech municipal elections was 48.00%, compared with 46.07% four years ago. This is according to the final results of the 2026 municipal council elections and the territorial overview of turnout from 2022 published by the Czech Statistical Office (ČSÚ). Turnout was higher in 3,777 of the 6,239 municipalities that held elections in both years, and in 12 of the 14 regions. It fell only in the Karlovy Vary Region (from 40.9% to 40.4%) and the Ústí nad Labem Region (from 40.6% to 40.5%).
In the towns where the fewest people had already voted in 2022, however, turnout continued to decline. Of the 99 towns with at least 10,000 voters, we took the quarter with the lowest turnout in 2022, that is, 24 towns with turnout of between 30% and 37%. Turnout fell in 18 of them, and the median change is −1.7 percentage points (pp). In the remaining three quarters of towns, median turnout rose by 0.9 to 1.1 pp. Five towns dropped below 30% this year: Jirkov (27.5%), Orlová (27.7%), Chomutov (28.5%), Sokolov (29.6%) and Most (29.9%). In 2022, no town of this size had turnout below 30%.
We compare turnout for the municipal council as a whole: how many people on the electoral register picked up an official envelope at the polling station. Prague and statutory cities with city districts are counted as a whole. We added up the figures from the records of all polling-district commissions in the ČSÚ open data and checked the result against the office's national figures. They match to a hundredth of a percentage point.
2022 is the point of comparison because it was the previous election of the same kind. Compared with the 2025 elections to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament, significantly fewer people voted in this year's municipal elections. We analysed which of last year's voters of the individual parties stayed at home in the article Who stayed at home. Here we compare municipal elections with municipal elections, so the difference between interest in national and local politics does not enter the result.
The comparison excludes municipalities where no election was held in one of the two years, because nobody submitted a candidate list, or where voting took place only in a repeat election. This concerns 14 municipalities, four with elections only in 2022 and ten only this year. 2022 includes only the regular elections of 23 and 24 September 2022.
Small municipalities show large swings. In a village with 150 voters, turnout changes by 10 pp if 15 more or fewer people turn up, and in 223 municipalities with fewer than 200 voters turnout changed by more than 20 pp. When opened, the map therefore shows only municipalities with 1,000 or more voters, and on mobile those with 5,000 or more. The others appear when you switch the municipality size to "All".
An arrow pointing up and to the right means turnout rose; an arrow pointing down and to the right means it fell. The length of the arrow corresponds to the difference in percentage points, and hovering over a municipality shows turnout in both years, the number of voters and whether a Senate election was held on the same day. In the default view, arrows showing a decline cluster in the towns of the Karviná, Most, Chomutov, Teplice and Sokolov areas. The district view adds up all the municipalities in each district: turnout fell in 10 of the 77 districts, most of all in Karviná (−2.0 pp) and Most (−1.6 pp).
The largest drops were in Sokolov, Orlová and Havířov
Of the 99 towns with 10,000 or more voters, forty-four had lower turnout than in 2022. It fell most in Sokolov, from 34.3% to 29.6% (−4.7 pp), in Orlová by 3.9 pp, in Havířov by 3.6 pp and in Bohumín by 3.5 pp. They are followed by Varnsdorf (−3.3 pp), Kroměříž and Bílina (both −3.1 pp). Thirteen of the 44 towns with lower turnout are in the Ústí nad Labem Region, seven in the Moravian-Silesian Region and four in the Karlovy Vary Region.
In Havířov, the commissions issued envelopes to 20,133 people in 2022 and to 17,412 this year, which is 2,721 fewer. Meanwhile the number of voters on the register fell by 2,005 to 56,271, so the number of people who came to vote fell by more than the number of voters on the register. In Jirkov, which has the lowest turnout of all towns of this size, 4,087 of 14,863 voters voted for the council this year.
The decline concerns the towns themselves, not whole districts. Sokolov district as a whole has turnout 1.1 pp higher than in 2022, even though in the town of Sokolov itself it fell by 4.7 pp. In Teplice district turnout fell by 0.1 pp, in the town of Teplice by 2.2 pp. In Chomutov district by 0.5 pp, in the town of Chomutov by 3.0 pp. In the rest of these districts, turnout in smaller municipalities developed in different ways and, taken together, fell less or rose.
Turnout rose most in Žďár nad Sázavou, from 41.8% to 47.6% (+5.9 pp), and in Nymburk by 5.2 pp. Among districts, it rose most in Rychnov nad Kněžnou (+5.9 pp), Prague-West (+5.4 pp) and Tachov (+5.0 pp). Prague as a whole gained 2.1 pp and stands at 46.0%, Brno gained 2.2 pp, and Ostrava lost 0.4 pp and stands at 35.0%.
Each point in the chart is one of the 99 towns. The horizontal axis shows its turnout in 2022, the vertical axis the change up to this year. On the left, where turnout is lowest, most points lie below zero; on the right, above it. The relationship between the two values is moderately strong (correlation coefficient 0.34). There are exceptions on both sides: Třinec and Neratovice had turnout below 35% in 2022 and gained more than 3 pp this year, while Kroměříž and Jihlava had over 44% and lost roughly 3 pp.
The chart does not explain why people in these towns are giving up voting. Turnout data say nothing about who stayed at home or why. They do show, however, that the gap between towns with high and low turnout has widened over four years. If these were random fluctuations, we would expect the opposite: towns with exceptionally low turnout in one year would tend to move back towards the average next time, not further away from it.
Concurrent Senate elections explain some of the differences, but not the decline in low-turnout towns
In both years, the first round of elections to the Senate, the upper chamber of the Czech parliament, was held together with the municipal elections, but each time in a different third of the constituencies. Those who came because of the Senate election could also take the envelope for the municipal council. In the 2,174 municipalities where a Senate election was held this year but not in 2022, turnout rose by 3.2 pp. In the 2,119 municipalities where a senator was elected only in 2022, it rose by 0.9 pp. And in the 1,946 municipalities with no Senate election in either year, it rose by 1.8 pp. According to this comparison, a concurrent Senate election therefore raises turnout by roughly one percentage point (0.8 to 1.4 pp) and explains part of why the arrows on the map point in different directions in neighbouring districts.
Senate elections do not explain the decline in the towns with the lowest turnout. In Sokolov, Havířov, Chomutov, Jirkov, Teplice and Bílina, there was no Senate election either in 2022 or this year. Among towns with no Senate election in either year, median turnout in the lowest quarter fell by 2.4 pp, whereas in the remaining three quarters it rose by 0.9 pp. Among towns with a Senate election only this year, the median in the lowest quarter is −0.9 pp and in the rest +2.6 pp. The difference is weaker only among towns where a senator was elected in 2022: there the median in the lowest quarter is 0.0 pp and in the rest +0.4 pp.
How we calculated it
We use the records of the polling-district commissions in the ČSÚ open data: municipal elections 2026 (final results, export of 11 October 2026), municipal elections 2022 and, for the concurrent Senate elections, 2026 and 2022. A municipality's turnout is the ratio of official envelopes issued to voters on the register, summed over all polling districts of the municipal council. The change is the difference between turnout in 2026 and 2022 in percentage points.
We count a municipality as one with a Senate election when the majority of its voters live in polling districts where the first round of the Senate elections was held on the same day. Large towns crossed by a Senate constituency boundary can thus fall into either group, depending on where more people live. The quarters of towns are formed from the 99 towns with at least 10,000 voters in 2026, ranked by turnout in 2022. All figures in the article, the map and the chart are calculated from these data by a single script.
