News

A newly released survey from the Czech polling agency STEM suggests that Czechs are losing faith in their parliament as well as in their president. The poll suggests that only 24% of Czechs are satisfied with Parliament’s performance, a four percent decrease on the previous month. Analysts suggest that these figures reflect public dissatisfaction in the wake of last month’s fiasco surrounding the presidential elections, in which the incumbent Václav Klaus was ultimately re-elected by Parliament for a second term. The STEM data also suggest that only 29 percent of Czechs have a favourable view of the current government, while the president still enjoys the support of 59% of Czechs – though the figure represents a 14 percent fall in popularity from June 2007.

The Czech National bank has asked people to be extremely cautious of and not respond to emails that claim to be from the bank. The news comes after it was announced that fraudsters had secured an email account that mirrored the email address of the national bank. The email address [email protected] has been highlighted as not belonging to the bank. This comes in the wake of a number of similar “phising” scandals in recent days, in which Czechs gave away bank details to criminals operating fake websites after receiving bogus emails.

Unsuccessful Czech presidential hopeful Jan Švejnar has added his voice to the debate over the recent award given by the Czech Prime Minister to the Mašin brothers. In an interview with the website novinky.cz, Švejnar stated that this was an issue that divided Czechs more than any other and added that although he valued the Mašin brothers, he would not personally have rewarded them with a Prime Ministerial medal. Josef and Ctirad Mašin achieved notoriety for escaping communist Czechoslovakia during the 1950s – they are criticized by some for the excessive violence used in their escape, which allegedly includes terrorism and murder.

The Czech government has failed to approve a proposed law that would enable fines of up to 10 million crowns to be levied on retail chains that abuse their dominant position in the marketplace. The proposed regulation, put forward by the opposition Social Democrats, along with the Alliance of Czech Food Producers, would have mandated that retail giants negotiate fair deals with suppliers and would also mandate an ethical codex be put in place for stores doing more than 5 billion crowns worth of business of year. The ruling Civic Democrats have insisted that current legislation is sufficient to deal with this issue. Despite not being supported by the government, the proposed legislation will still be debated in the lower chamber.