Hard-line Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to run for parliament for first time

The hard-line Communist Party of Czechoslovakia is planning to stand in general elections for the first time in 2006, leader Miroslav Stepan said on Wednesday. Mr Stepan, the Communist Party chief in Prague before 1989, spent two and a half years in prison in the early 1990s for trying to crush the Velvet Revolution. He said his party were growing in strength and attracting disaffected members of the more mainstream Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, which is the second biggest opposition group in the Czech parliament.