News

Czechia's public finance deficit should shrink to 2.2 percent of GDP this year, down from last year's 3.6 percent, the Finance Ministry revealed on Thursday. However, the overall public debt will increase to 45.6 percent of GDP from last year's 43.7 percent, according to the forecast. Finance Minister Zbyněk Stanjura applauded the fact that Czechia would no longer rank among the countries with the fastest-growing debt in the EU.

The Istanbul Convention would have had a better chance of being adopted if there had been a more thorough and wider societal debate, Prime Minister Petr Fiala told Czech tabloid Blesk on Thursday. In his opinion, some of the government coalition partners were in too much of a hurry to get it ratified, and it was not approved in the Senate on Wednesday evening by a very narrow margin, only two votes short of adoption.

The Christian Democrats voted overwhelmingly against ratifying the convention, the Pirates and Mayors and Independents parties were mostly in favour, while the prime minister's own Civic Democrat party was divided.

The Czech Senate has narrowly failed to approve the so-called Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Only 34 of the 71 senators present for Wednesday night’s vote were in favour of its ratification, two votes short of adoption. The vote followed seven hours of often intense debate.

Czechia will thus be among the minority of European states that have signed but not ratified the convention.

The Chamber of Deputies was also meant to vote on the document. However, in view of the Senate's position it is not now expected to discuss it, the Czech News Agency said.

President Petr Pavel has indicated he will not run for a second term as head of state, the news site Novinky.cz reported. At a public debate in the Plzeň Region on Tuesday evening he said that one five-year term, if one carried it out to the full, would suffice.

Mr. Pavel said that one pre-election campaign had been more than enough and he did not have much appetite to undergo another. The 62-year-old said that he had come across a comment that, at international level, high politics had become a “geriatric park”, adding that room should be made for young blood.