Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala moved to replace a minister from a junior ruling party, plunging his increasingly unpopular coalition government into turmoil a year before general elections.

Fiala said on Tuesday he would ask President Petr Pavel to remove Ivan Bartos, outgoing leader of the Pirate Party, as vice premier and regional development minister on Sept 30. He said he wasn’t seeking to dismantle the five-party coalition and had asked the Pirates to nominate a new cabinet member.

Bartos pushed back, saying Fiala’s move was a violation of the coalition agreement and the whole party was being pushed out from the executive. Speaking at a press conference in Prague, he stopped short of saying the Pirates themselves would seek to leave the administration.

The centre-right government is grappling with declining popularity a year before parliamentary elections and the rising prospects of the populist opposition led by billionaire and former prime minister Andrej Babis. His ANO party dominated a ballot for regional administrations on Friday and Saturday, with the Pirates suffering the worst defeat among all the coalition partners.

Even if the Pirates were to leave the coalition, the remaining four ruling parties would still have a comfortable majority in the lower chamber of parliament and would be able to stay in power.

Fiala said the main reason for his move was Bartos’s failure to complete a planned switch to online processing of building permits, a major part of the government’s efforts to speed up housing and road construction. The project’s delays and technical setbacks hurt the ruling coalition in last week’s elections, with the Pirates failing to win any seats in all but one regional assembly.

“I can see no other solution,” Fiala told reporters in Prague. “Digitalisation is a key project for the modernization of the Czech state, and we can’t afford any further delays.”

  - Bloomberg