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In his first official comments on the government’s fall, President Václav Klaus said on Wednesday that it was not a catastrophe. The President added that it was the fourth time he had been confronted by such a situation during his six years in office. The President will now take centre stage in deciding how to solve the political vacuum. There is some speculation Mr Klaus contributed to the government’s fall by giving assurances to rebel Civic Democrats with some commentators also pointing to his unprecedented appearance at the Social Democrat Party congress days ahead of the confidence vote. The President’s relations with Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek have been strained. He cut his links to the Civic Democrat Party in protest at the government’s policies late last year.

One of the first polls published since the government’s fall has actually pointed to a Civic Democrat victory in June elections to the European Parliament. The poll by CVVM gave the Civic Democrats 31 percent against the second-placed Social Democrats with 29 percent. The Communist Party would get 12.5 percent, the Greens 6.5 percent and Christian Democrats 5.0 percent according to the March survey. It indicated that only around half of Czechs would actually turn out to vote.

An EU court has backed Czech state-owned brewery Budějovický Budvar in its long-running trademark battle with US beer giant Anheuser-Busch. The Luxembourg-based European Court of First Instance threw out an appeal made by Anheuser-Busch against an earlier decision preventing it from registering the Budweiser trademark in the EU saying the Czech brewer already had rights to use the description in Germany and Austria. The two companies have been waging a trademark war over the right to use the “budweiser” name for over 100 years. Anheuser-Busch can still appeal to the EU’s highest court.

The government of Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek has fallen after losing a vote of no-confidence tabled by the opposition Social Democrats. The motion was carried by the bare minimum of 101 votes, when rebel Civic Democrat MPs Vlastimil Tlustý and Jan Schwippel and ex-Greens Věra Jakubková and Olga Zubová cast their votes with the 97 Social Democrat and Communist MPs in the lower house.

Prime Minister Topolánek said on Monday that if the government fell he would expect President Václav Klaus to charge him with forming a new government; if that failed, he would then push for fresh elections in the summer. Mr Topolánek has rejected the idea of a caretaker government. However, much remains unclear about what will follow Tuesday’s dramatic vote.

The fall of the government comes almost exactly halfway through the Czech Republic’s six-month presidency of the European Union. The prime minister told Czech Television he believed the presidency could function effectively, even without a stable government.

The three-party coalition government, made up of Mirek Topolánek’s Civic Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Greens, was appointed in January 2007.