From Dawn Till Dusk? The Movement Dawn of Direct Democracy: From the New Party to Split

Early national elections to the Chamber of Deputies in 2013 were quite specific in the Czech Republic. Relatively high number of parties reach the 5 % limit and become the members of the Czech Lower Chamber. The aim of this study is to focus on one of the genuinely new actors in the Czech party system – the movement Dawn of Direct Democracy reached 6,88 % votes and gained 14 seates from 200. This movement with only nine members was strongly pressing for direct democracy, Czech national interests and anti-estabslihment appeals too. In 2015 after hard disputes inside the party primarily based on accepting of new members and influenced by a financial doubts was the party internally divided into two groups: the first one was supporting the Czech-Japanese founder and entrepreneur Tomio Okamura and the second one group was standing against him. In effect this process led to split up the party, because Tomio Okamura has founded a new party called Freedom and Direct Democracy. The „old“ Dawn was renamed and rebranded to Dawn-National Coalition. There is obvious split of former new movement Dawn of Direct Democracy into two new political parties. This case study focuses on the beginnings of Dawn of Direct Democracy, on results of important elections and on key events which led to final break up. The main goal is to describe a dominant causes of split and to compare two new parties on the background of theory of new political parties. In fact the Freedom and Direct Democracy of Tomio Okamura is nowadays more successful than „new-new“ Dawn-National Coalition.