Prague Spring elects culture minister to lead its governing board

Oto Klempíř, the Czech culture minister, has been unanimously elected chair of the Prague Spring festival’s administrative board. The appointment follows the departure of former minister Martin Baxa, who held the chair from 2023 to 2026 and was removed from the board earlier this year.

The change concerns the festival’s governance, a distinction that board member and former festival director Roman Bělor has emphasised. Artistic programming remains the responsibility of the festival’s management, rather than passing automatically to the new chair.

Robert Hanč has been festival director since 1 January 2026. Prague Spring also has separate artistic and supervisory structures, making it important to distinguish the responsibilities of the different bodies when assessing the significance of the minister’s appointment.

The development comes as the culture ministry reviews its relationships with several major organisations. The ministry has described the exercise in terms of the purpose and benefits of those partnerships and their connection with cultural policy; it has not presented it as a blanket termination of cooperation.

For an international festival, the relationship between public support and artistic autonomy is always consequential. A governing board can influence an institution’s conditions without selecting individual works or performers, through its oversight of strategy, resources and accountability.

That makes the next phase more important than the title alone. Clear explanations of how decisions are made, and where artistic responsibility sits, will provide a firmer basis for judging the change than assumptions about what a ministerial chairmanship must mean.

At present, the confirmed development is the board election. It does not itself demonstrate a new artistic direction, a revised programme or a funding cut. Those would require separate decisions, and should be reported as such if they occur.