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The Czech government will probably decide upon a date for euro adoption next year, Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek said on Tuesday. Speaking to his Maltese counterpart, Lawrence Gonzi, Mr Topolánek said that there was now no time to come up with a date for euro adoption this year. Malta entered into the eurozone at the start of this year, which PM Lawrence Gonzi described in Prague on Tuesday as having been a ‘fundamental step’ for his country. The head of the Czech National Bank Zdeněk Tůma has said that euro adoption should be debated in 2009, in light of exporters’ calls to switch to the single European currency and the global financial crisis.

Six percent of the firms operating in the Czech Republic are planning redundancies in the next three months, suggests the Manpower Labour Market Index, which came out on Tuesday. The last such index released in September found that only one percent of firms in this country were planning job cuts. The situation is worst in Moravia, suggests the study. The index, however, does indicate that the situation overall in the Czech Republic is more favourable than elsewhere in Europe, such as in Ireland, Spain and Italy, where larger-scale redundancies are predicted.

If an election had been held in November, then the opposition Social Democrats would have won with 42.7 percent of the vote, suggests a poll conducted by the Median agency and released on Tuesday. The ruling Civic Democrats would have finished second with some 29.1 percent of the vote. The Civic Democrats’ coalition partners, the Greens, would have failed to secure the five-percent share of the vote to remain in Parliament. The Median poll found that Jiří Paroubek’s Social Democrats had increased their popularity by more than three percentage points on last month’s figures, the only other political party to gain in popularity was the Christian Democrats, which would have secured 5.9 percent of the votes cast.

Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, who was re-elected head of the Civic Democratic Party over the weekend, has indicated there may be changes in the centre-right coalition government. Mr. Topolánek told reporters shortly after his election victory that he was planning to meet with the leaders of the two other parties in government, the Christian Democrats and the Greens, to discuss the government’s future set-up. He would not elaborate on his plans ahead of the meeting. The re-elected Civic Democrat leader said his current priorities were to consolidate his party, to deal with the impact of the global financial crisis on the Czech economy and to focus on the Czech EU presidency starting on January 1st.