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President Miloš Zeman has started a series of meetings with party leaders with regard to the ongoing government crisis. On Friday afternoon he received the Civic Democratic Party’s nominee for prime minister Miroslava Němcová and acting party leader Martin Kuba at his residence in Lány. It will be up to the president to decide who will be given a chance to form the next cabinet. The president has not indicated whether he plans to give the outgoing centre-right coalition another chance to form a government. Mr. Zeman plans to meet with the leaders of all parliamentary parties over the weekend and will make his position known at a press conference on Tuesday.

The public trust rating of the centre-right Civic Democrats has dropped to an all time low in the wake of a crippling corruption scandal that resulted in the demise of prime minister Petr Necas and his resignation as party leader. According to the results of a flash poll conducted in the wake of the scandal, the Civic Democrats would only get 8 percent of the vote in general elections. The Social Democrats would win the elections with 29,3 percent of the vote and the Communist Party would come in second with 16.1 percent. TOP 09 would come in third with 15 percent. The only two other parties who would make it past the 5 percent margin needed to win seats in Parliament would be the Christian Democrats with 7.5 percent and the Party of Citizens’ Rights with 6.6 percent.

Lower house speaker Miroslava Němcová says that in her view the police raid on government offices last week violated constitutional principles. In an interview for Friday’s edition of the daily Hospodářské Noviny, Mrs. Němcová criticized the fact that the country’s leading officials were kept in the dark for hours about the purpose of the raid and even after the police failed to provide any information which would justify such extreme action. She said that if she is appointed to lead the next cabinet she would ask the interior and justice ministries to look into the matter.

More than half of Czechs would prefer snap elections as a way of resolving the current government crisis, according to a poll carried out by Median agency for Czech Radio. The second most popular preference is to have an interim government manage the country until scheduled elections in May of next year. If a political government were to be chosen, 29 percent would prefer to see a prime minister from the Social Democratic Party and 22 percent would prefer a Civic Democrat to head the government. The current government crisis was triggered by the resignation of Prime Minister Petr Nečas, who left his post on Monday amid a huge corruption scandal involving his chief-of-staff.