Ex-president Havel slams work of Prague City Hall

Ex-president Václav Havel has launched a stinging attack on Civic Democrats at Prague City Hall. In an article published in Saturday’s Lidové Noviny Mr. Havel criticized the city hall for cutting subsidies to the arts, for its lack of urban planning and for a reliance on tourist revenues. In an unusually blunt intervention in domestic politics the former president said the management of Prague City Hall was hurting Prague’s interests. City lawmakers have sparked a wave of protests from Prague’s theatrical world with a new programme of subsidies which Mr. Havel said would strangle to death non-profit-making theatres. The ex-president also criticized the city hall for sanctioning what he called “uninspired architecture” with giant warehouses and shopping centres “spreading like cancer” and the fact that local life was being forced out of the city centre.