Advancing of national interests would benefit from political agreement, says foreign minister as party figures argue

The advancing of the Czech Republic’s national interests would benefit from greater agreement between the country’s political parties, the foreign minister, Jan Kohout, said at a conference on foreign policy on Monday. At the seminar, which took place at the Foreign Ministry, representatives of the two biggest Czech parties the Social Democrats and the Civic Democrats traded accusations as to which of them had most harmed Czech foreign policy in recent times. The Civic Democrats’ Alexandr Vondra said the foreign policy of a mid-sized state should not be the victim of domestic squabbling, which was a policy Social Democrats leader Jiří Paroubek had begun in 2006. But Social Democrat Jan Hamáček said it was the Civic Democrats, who led the last Czech government, that had damaged the country’s standing in the world and the EU.