"Prague and love must prevail over village and hatred"? Cleavages and voting patterns in the Czech presidential election 2023

The Czech presidential elections in 2023 brought a whole series of situations that showed a significant division of society and, at the same time, several stereotypes that appear around Czech society in the context of electoral behaviour. One was a paraphrase of former president Václav Havel's quote "Truth and love must win over the lies and hatred" to the form "Prague and love must win over the village and hatred", which alluded to the alleged division of society into urban and rural populations and their different voting behaviour. Therefore, the authors of the statement point to the existence of a specific split in Czech society, which, according to them, should have manifested itself in the Czech presidential elections when Petr Pavel and Andrej Babiš faced each other in the second round. On the other hand, the Czech municipal structure is very fragmented and composed of many very small and heterogeneous municipalities. This is why the conclusions cannot be generalised this way (Musil and Müller 2008). At the same time, the party-political dimension significantly entered these elections, as they were a clash between a candidate supported by parties in government and the chairman of the main opposition party in the second round. The presented paper includes a political, sociological, and geographical component. It will focus on analysing voting behaviour in the context of: 1) cleavages with an emphasis on the land/industry conflict line (Lipset and Rokkan 1967); 2) overlap with the electoral support of political parties. The analysis will take place using two techniques. The first will be an OLS regression to illustrate the relationship between electoral support, socioeconomic characteristics, and political party support in the parliamentary election 2021. The second technique will be to analyse the spatial autocorrelation of electoral support for presidential candidates on maps using mapping software and compare it to political party electoral support.