Czech PM supports his Slovak counterpart

The outgoing Czech prime minister and Social Democrat leader Jiri Paroubek has said that he supports Slovakia's new leftist prime minister Robert Fico despite the fact that he has formed a coalition with a far right nationalist party. Mr. Paroubek told reporters he thought the new Slovak government was being unnecessarily demonized and that he planned to write an open letter to the party of European Socialists to try and persuade them not to isolate Slovakia's new prime minister. The Strasbourg-based assembly's Socialist caucus is demanding that Fico's Smer party be excluded from the Party of European Socialists, an umbrella organization for left wing parties in the 25-nation European Union, which Slovakia joined in 2004.