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Czech robot engineers have taken home two silver and two bronze medals from Field Robot Event, a robot engineering competition that took place in Germany over the weekend. Two Czech teams from Charles University and the Czech University of Life Sciences participated in the competition. Czechs won medals in categories such as advanced navigation. Now in its eighth year, the competition featured twenty-two teams from seven countries.

Leaders of three Czech right-of-center parties have commented on the results of the general elections that took place in Slovakia on Saturday. Petr Nečas, the current acting leader of the Civic Democrats, said that he found the Slovak results were similar to the outcome of the recent lower house elections in the Czech Republic. He added that voters no longer put faith in promises of left-of-center parties. The head of TOP 09 and former foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg said he saw a positive development in both countries while Public Affairs leader Radek John judged that Slovak voters had decided in favor of fiscal responsibility.

While the left-wing SMER party of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico won the most votes, it lacks a clear majority and possible coalition partners. A center-right coalition of four parties led by the conservative SDKU claimed 79 out of the 150 seats up for grabs in parliament and could well form a government coalition.

The most likely prime minister, the acting leader of the Civic Democrats Petr Nečas and Miroslav Kalousek, of the Civic Democrat’s coalition partner TOP 09 said on Sunday that this year’s state budget had to lowered by another ten billion Czech crowns or more to achieve a state budget deficit of 5.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Mr Nečas said that the future government should take steps to actively create next year’s state budget. Last year, the state budget deficit reached a record sum of 192.4 billion Czech crowns. One of the conditions for the Czech Republic to join the Eurozone is that the state budget deficit be lowered to three percent of GDP by 2013.

On Sunday, the leadership of the Green Party is to evaluate its defeat in the recent general elections. Other points of discussion will be the senate elections to take place in fall as well as an upcoming party conference, where some senior party members may resign. The outgoing leader of the Green Party, Ondřej Liška, said that the party lost a lot of votes due to bad polling results prior to the elections which indicated that the party would not have a chance at gaining the five percent of the vote that is necessary to win seats in the parliament.

Mr Liška resigned from his post as party leader following the poor election result of only 2.44 percent of the vote, but has since said that he will decide by the end of June whether to apply for the same position again.