At 4:30 on Saturday morning, 24 October, a few hundred people were still on the cobblestones of Malostranské náměstí, outside the Czech Parliament. Shortly before the vote, the crowd chanted “Hlasuj proti!” (Vote against!), and whistling spread across the square. At 4:36 a.m., MPs inside voted down the opposition’s motion to reject a bill abolishing the licence fee that funds Czech Television (ČT) and Czech Radio (ČRo). The bill passed its first reading and went to committee.
The protest had begun the previous day. The first people arrived around midday on Friday, with no stage and no sound system. By evening, hundreds had gathered. They chanted “Média nedáme!” (We won’t give up the media!) and called on MPs to come out. Opposition parties put ČT and ČRo logos in the windows of their offices in the parliament building. At one point, the loudspeakers played “Modlitba pro Martu”, the Marta Kubišová song that became a symbol of resistance to the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, which she sang again during the Velvet Revolution.
The night was not entirely calm. Around 10:30 p.m., several dozen people tried to get into the building and were stopped by police. Overnight, police detained one person for throwing a paving stone at the building; organisers described the clashes as isolated. STAN leader Vít Rakušan called it the longest demonstration in Czech history.
A day and a half later, the protests had crossed the river and grown. On Sunday afternoon, Old Town Square was so full that police stopped people from entering via side streets. I found myself there with thousands of others for a rally called “Hands off the media”, organised by the civic movement Milion chvilek pro demokracii (A Million Moments for Democracy). Many wore hats folded from newspaper, like the one worn by Večerníček, the animated boy who has introduced bedtime cartoons on Czech screens since 1965. One cardboard sign read simply “4:36”. On the giant screens, another summed up the mood: “Dnes peníze, zítra obsah!” Today the money, tomorrow the content.
For many of the protesters, the fee itself was not the point. The question was who public media would answer to.
Today, Czech households pay CZK 150 (about €6) a month for television and CZK 55 for radio: CZK 2,460, or about €100, a year. Since a 2025 reform, the obligation also covers internet-connected devices. The money goes straight to ČT and ČRo, without passing through the government.
Before the 2025 election, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s ANO promised to scrap the fee. His coalition with the far-right SPD and the right-wing Motorists now wants to replace it with direct payments from the state budget: CZK 5.74 billion for Czech Television and CZK 2.065 billion for Czech Radio. Together, that is about CZK 1.4 billion (about €58 million) less than the two broadcasters expect to collect from fees, a cut of around 15%.
The government says the payments would be written into law as mandatory spending and would rise with inflation. “No one wants to interfere with programming or news coverage,” Babiš wrote on X.
Scrapping the fee is not a new idea. The Pirates promised it in their 2017 programme, and ODS said in 2009 that it would consider it. Both now oppose this bill, and their old plans differed from it in one key way: safeguards. The Pirates wanted ČT and ČRo to get a fixed share of VAT revenue, an automatic formula politicians could not cut each year. ODS proposed channelling state money through an independent Council of Public Service. The coalition relies on a legal guarantee and inflation indexing instead.
How the bill moved was as striking as what it contains. On the morning of Friday, 23 October, the coalition unexpectedly moved it to the top of parliament’s agenda, having reportedly kept the plan quiet so the opposition could not prepare to stall it. That evening, on a proposal from Speaker Tomio Okamura, the majority capped the debate at nine hours, limited how long each MP could speak, and fixed the vote for 4:36 a.m. Sixty five registered speakers never reached the podium.
The sitting lasted about 20 hours, and the result followed party lines exactly. All 81 votes to reject the bill came from the five opposition parties: ODS, STAN, the Pirates, KDU-ČSL and TOP 09. All 96 coalition MPs present, from ANO, SPD and the Motorists, voted not to kill the bill. Not one MP crossed over. Babiš himself did not vote.
President Petr Pavel, who calls public service media “among the fundamental pillars of our democracy”, questioned the rush. For many protesters, the hour itself became the story: a bill about who pays for public information, pushed through its first reading at 4:36, while most of the country was asleep.
The case for change is not empty. The fee is a flat charge, the same for most households, whatever their income. Culture Minister Oto Klempíř argues that budget funding is an established European model. Finland, for example, replaced its TV licence in 2013 with a dedicated, income-based tax that funds its public broadcaster, Yle.
Critics reply that the source of the money matters less than the rules around it. A budget line passes through the government and parliament, and what one majority writes into law, the next can cut. In their view, budget funding only works where firm safeguards keep politicians away from the money. The Czech weekly Reflex rejected the government’s comparison with other European countries: “We’re not living in Scandinavia here.”
That is the fear behind the sign on the big screen. A broadcaster that depends on the government’s goodwill for its budget may think twice before it investigates that government. Today the money, tomorrow the content.
Eduard Ovchinnikov was at the protests, and for him, this too was about more than a monthly fee.
“For me the key aspect is upholding the essential conditions of democracy such as independent media and the freedom to criticize those in power. Also, the fact that I’m from Russia plays a big role, as I’ve seen what the gradual restriction of these freedoms leads to.”
For context, Russia did not shut down independent media overnight. Major TV networks changed hands under state pressure in 2000 and 2001, “foreign agent” labels for media followed from 2017, and in 2022 the country’s last independent TV channel was blocked. Seen through that experience, a change to how public media are funded is never just a technical question.
The bill does not, on its own, hand the government control of ČT or ČRo. According to European media freedom groups, it leaves the councils that oversee them unchanged. What protesters fear is what it makes possible later. Once the money comes from the state budget, a future majority can cut it with an ordinary law. “In Slovakia, the first slap was the abolition of the licence fee,” the Slovak journalist Soňa Gyarfašová told the journalist Rob Cameron in June. “You have to react to the first slap.”
Words from the coalition have fed that fear. After the vote, Speaker Tomio Okamura told the news site Aktuálně.cz that he is “not at all attached” to the idea of publicly funded Czech Television and Czech Radio, and that he would support a proposal to abolish them. Opposition parties have compared the reform to Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary. Outside parliament on Friday night, the film director Václav Marhoul reminded the crowd that Orbán “managed to destroy public media” and, in the end, took over private media and the courts as well.
Much of the worry is about accountability: who will be left to ask hard questions about power and public money. “Independent media are an unwanted mirror for politicians of their actions,” Ivana Šuláková, who chairs the Syndicate of Journalists of the Czech Republic, told the investigative network OCCRP. Activists warn that cuts to regional public media would silence “the very reporters who hold local powerful actors accountable”.
At the rallies, the language was blunter. “At 4:36, decisions are made by mafia clans or a Soviet politburo,” Mikuláš Minář told the crowd in Old Town Square. One sign there read “Zloděj krade v noci”: a thief steals at night. The journalist Lída Rakušanová told the same crowd that the government “abuses institutions, changes the rules and tries to take over democratic institutions for its own benefit”.
The government rejects these fears. “There is no war for independent media,” Babiš wrote on Facebook, adding that “no nationalisation of media is being prepared”. He argues that budget funding is fairer to poorer households. When a heckler called Okamura a thief on 28 October, he replied: “I have never stolen anything.”
What happens in Prague matters beyond Czechia. Since August 2025, the EU’s European Media Freedom Act has required member states to fund public service media through procedures “based on transparent and objective criteria laid down in advance”, which guarantee “adequate, sustainable and predictable financial resources”. The European Broadcasting Union has repeatedly warned that the Czech reform must not expose ČT and ČRo to political pressure.
Next door, Slovakia shows how questions of money and control can meet. Its parliament abolished the licence fee in 2023 and tied public broadcasting funding to 0.17% of GDP. A year later, a new government under Robert Fico replaced the broadcaster RTVS with a new one, STVR, whose supervisory council includes four members appointed by the culture minister. Reporters Without Borders said the new law conflicted with European media freedom rules.
Czechs have been here before, too. In the winter of 2000–2001, Czech Television staff occupied the broadcaster’s facilities and put their protest on air after a director seen as loyal to a major political party was appointed. About 100,000 people filled Wenceslas Square in their support. The director resigned, and parliament changed the law to keep politicians further away from the broadcaster.
The bill is not law yet. It now goes to committee, then to a second reading, where amendments can be tabled, and a final third-reading vote. After that, the Senate can reject or amend it, and the President can veto it, but the lower house can override them with 101 of its 200 votes. The coalition holds 108 seats. Until a new law takes effect, the current fees still apply.
Babiš has defended the bill and accused the opposition of escalating tensions. Staff at both broadcasters plan an all-day strike on 3 November, the day parliament resumes. Milion chvilek has called another rally for 15 November at Letná, the Prague plain where nearly a million people gathered during the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
Neither a night outside parliament nor an afternoon in Old Town Square will decide this. The next test is whether that public pressure turns into real safeguards at the second reading: rules that keep the broadcasters’ money out of politicians’ reach. It is a test for Czechia, and for a European Union that has only just written media independence into law.