News

The Health Minister, Social Democrat Milada Emmerova has said that the leadership of the party discussed the possibility of early general elections at its Saturday meeting. Speaking in a televised debate on Sunday, Minister Emmerova added that early elections were not the Social Democrats' first option but merely one of the possible alternatives. The Social Democrats experienced election defeats in June in the European elections, last weekend in the elections to the regional assemblies and in this weekend's second round of Senate elections, where no Social Democrat candidate was elected.

The senior opposition Civic Democrats won all three of the elections and the junior opposition Communist Party finished second, ahead of the governing Social Democrats.

A special commission which was set up to prevent mass immigration of Roma from neighbouring Slovakia will cease to exist, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry has said. He added that the fears of a mass influx of Roma economic migrants, following the cuts in social benefits in Slovakia and EU accession, have not materialised. In recent years, whole families moved over to live with their relatives in the Czech Republic hoping to improve their living standard. According to the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry the immigration only worsened the living conditions of the Czech Roma population as they now live in overcrowded flats, pay extra expenses, and crime, illegal money-lending and illegal employment are on the rise in the community.

The right-wing opposition Civic Democrats have come out as clear victors in elections to a third of the upper house of the Czech parliament, the Senate, but they have fallen short of an absolute majority. Even before the vote-count was complete, it was clear that the ruling Social Democrats had failed to defend any of the three seats which they were contending in this weekend's run-offs. The smaller parties in the ruling coalition also sustained losses. There was disappointment too for the opposition Communists, who had nine candidates in the run-offs, but won in only one constituency. For the first time a Senator has been elected for the Green Party, the journalist Jaromir Stetina in Prague. The overall turnout was extremely low, at under 20 percent, the lowest in the history of Czech Senate elections.

Six central European countries, including the Czech Republic, have announced that they want to set up a joint explosives and ammunitions database. At a conference in Prague the countries' interior ministers said that the database would help in the fight against organized crime. The author of the initiative, Slovak Interior Minister, Vladimir Palko, said that a special international organization, similar in structure to Interpol, would be set up to oversee co-ordination of the project.