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05/20/2009
Czech Television is planning to file a lawsuit against the neo-Nazi National Party after the group sent the station a racist campaign ad promising the “final solution of the Gypsy problem”, the news website novinky.cz reported. Czech TV broadcast the clip on Wednesday, because legally they had no choice, a spokesperson said. Both Prime Minister Jan Fischer and Minorities Minister Michael Kocáb condemned the election spot and called on the minister of the interior, Jan Pecina, to order an investigation into the matter.
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05/20/2009
A caretaker Czech government due to lead the country until early general elections will not send the issue of a planned US radar base to the lower house of parliament, the Czech foreign minister, Jan Kohout, told Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper Lidové noviny. Mr Kohout said the subject was not on the interim government’s agenda and would be dealt with by whoever is elected in October. While the Senate approved Czech-US treaties allowing for the placing of a radar base in central Bohemia, ex-prime minister Mirek Topolánek withdrew the matter from the agenda of the Chamber of Deputies due to a lack of support.
It is not clear whether America plans to go ahead with the construction of an anti-missile shield project developed by the previous administration. In Prague in April President Barack Obama merely reiterated his previous position that it could go ahead if it was proven to work and was cost effective, and if a threat from Iran remained.
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05/20/2009
Fifty-five percent of Czechs regard Jan Fischer as a good prime minister, suggests an opinion poll carried out this week by the STEM agency for the newspaper Právo. Just over a quarter of respondents took the opposite view of the caretaker prime minister. Meanwhile, three quarters of those polled said they believed Mr Fischer’s caretaker cabinet would win a confidence vote. His government, which was appointed on May 8, has 30 days to win confidence in the lower house.
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05/20/2009
In an interview with the AFP news agency, Prime Minister Fischer said his government would seek a ban on the far-right Workers’ Party. A request from the previous government to have the group declared illegal was rejected by a Czech court. Mr Fischer also said his interim cabinet would not set a date for adoption of the common European currency. The caretaker prime minister is due to unveil his government’s policy priorities in the next few days.
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05/20/2009
In a study by Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development, the Czech Republic ranks 37th out of 57 states in terms of readiness to deal with the impacts of the financial crisis. The Institute’s “stress test” focused on how well equipped countries are to face the crisis and to increase their competitiveness in the near future. Denmark did best in the survey.
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05/20/2009
The Janáček’s May International Music Festival gets underway in Ostrava on Wednesday evening. The north Moravian city is the centre of the 34th Janáček’s May festival, which also takes place in six other towns in the region over a period of three weeks. The focus this year is on female vocalists. The great Czech composer Leoš Janáček was a native of the north Moravian region and died in Ostrava in 1928.
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05/19/2009
Civic Democrat leader Mirek Topolánek has sharply rejected President Václav Klaus’s accusations of unprecedented lobbying during his government’s tenure. Hitting back in an interview for the daily Mladá fronta Dnes, Mr Topolánek enumerated a list of lobbyists closely linked to Mr Klaus’s government in the 1990’s, adding that the president would most likely deny knowing the lobbyists in question and that under normal circumstances he would not have brought the matter up on the grounds of common courtesy. Mr. Klaus in recent years has been unsparingly critical of the Civic Democrats, the party he himself founded in 1991, for what he sees as a divergence from core conservative principals under Mr Topolanek’s leadership. The current dispute was sparked by Mr Klaus’s claim that no government in the course of the past 20 years had allowed lobbying to reach the level it did during Mr Topolánek’s tenure."
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05/19/2009
Social Democratic Party head Jiří Paroubek has conceded the possibility of selling off Prague International Airport in the future, though only in better economic times. The proposed sale has been a point of heated contention between the major parties, with the previous government approving the airport’s privatisation for what the Social Democrats claim is nearly a third of its value. Prime Minister Jan Fischer also said on Monday that his caretaker government would not be making decisions in the privatisation process, but preparations for the sale of Prague Airport would continue. The Social Democrats have threatened to withhold their support for the new government in the upcoming vote of confidence unless the airport privatisation is taken off the table.
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05/19/2009
Mr Paroubek on Tuesday also objected to remarks made by former president Václav Havel regarding the automobile manufacturer Škoda Auto. Speaking of the dangers of overproduction on Monday, Mr Havel said he thought it “monstrous” to expect the auto industry to make more cars for the sake of unemployment, and compared the idea to requiring concentration camps solely for the employment of guards and jailers. The Social Democrats on Tuesday asked that Mr Havel apologize to the workers of the Škoda factory, to which the ex-president’s office replied only that there would be no comment for the time being.
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05/19/2009
The Czech branch of Amnesty International has announced it will be holding a “parallel summit” on human rights violations in China on Wednesday to coincide with an EU-China summit hosted by the Czech Republic. The new Czech government has come under pressure from human rights organizations to raise the issues of human rights and the environment in talks with Chinese leaders. On Monday the Green Party presented Prime Minister Jan Fischer with a petition to that end, and members of the Friends of Tibet parliamentary group were rebuffed in their attempt to give the petition to President Václav Klaus, who is chairing the summit. The summit agenda is to cover the global economic crisis, the environment and economic relations between the EU and China, which is the EU’s primary trade partner after the US.
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