Tsjechische regering treedt af (en)

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Czech centre-right prime minister Mirek Topolanek has handed in his cabinet's resignation following last week's failure to win a confidence vote in parliament.

Speaking to journalists after his government formally stepped down on Wednesday (11 October), the leader of the Czech conservative civic democrats party (ODS) suggested the best way out of the months' long political deadlock would be early elections.

"That is a solution which should be acceptable to everybody," he noted, according to CTK agency.

But it is now up to the country's president, Vaclav Klaus, to make the next move and either appoint a cabinet of technocrats to rule until the early elections or pass the ruling baton to a minority government led by the social democrats, the main opposition party.

Mr Klaus is expected to announce his decision after the forthcoming elections to the Senate - the upper house of the Czech legislature - scheduled for late October.

The ODS won the elections in early June but failed to get a sufficient majority using other right-leaning parties to form a ruling coalition that would get through parliament.

The vote produced an exact division between the right and left-leaning parties, with a hundred deputies on both sides, and the stalemate it created has sparked calls for a change in the country's election law.

Mr Klaus complained on Wednesday that he had seen four government resignations since becoming president in 2003.

"That is quite a high number and it says something about our country. It says something about our political situation, about the division of our political forces," he said.

Outgoing prime minister Topolanek announced his party would try to push through a proposal to reduce the number of parliamentary seats from 200 to 199, in order to prevent clear-cut splits in the House leading to similar stalemates.

According to the latest opinion poll, published by Median agency on Tuesday (10 October), the conservative ODS has come out slightly strengthened after the political turmoil and is leading with 39.1 percent, followed by the social democrats with 29.4 percent.

Plans for EU presidency delayed

The unstable political situation in Prague may cause a delay in the country's preparation for its EU chairmanship, starting in January 2009.

The Czech Republic will be the second new member state - of the ten that joined the bloc in 2004 - to take on the union's six-month rotating presidency, following Slovenia in the first half of 2008.

Mr Topolanek was originally planning to appoint a special representative charged with overlooking the preparations but he has abandoned the idea.

Still, he pointed out on Wednesday that it would be "unacceptable" if Prague's preparation for the presidency was delayed due to "turbulence on the Czech political scene."

The Czech government collapse comes in the context of wider political turmoil in central Europe, with the Polish authorities currently struggling to create a new coalition and with Hungary's prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany keeping his job by the skin of his teeth following media leaks that he had lied to win elections.