Politicians push ahead with formula for direct presidential elections

Political parties in the Czech Republic have just agreed some of the main lines of how a future president would be elected by the people for the first time. But while the main agreement is in place a lot of the details are still missing – and that’s where the devil lurks. We look at the progress towards direct presidential elections. Justice Minister Jiří Pospíšil on Wednesday outlined the main planks on how a future president could be elected.

Photo: Kristýna Maková, Czech Radio - Radio Prague

Government coalition parties and the leading opposition party, the Social Democrats, have agreed on a two-round vote if no candidate wins more than fifty percent of support at the first attempt. The two best placed candidates would fight it out in a follow up face off. The formula is already the tried and tested one used for elections to the upper house, the Senate. So there’s not so much surprise there. More interesting perhaps are the nomination thresholds for candidates. Anyone wanting to run will have to get backing from 10 senators, 20 lower house deputies or 50,000 citizens.

So far, so good. But switching to direct elections of the president from the current system where he is elected by members of the two houses of parliament does raise questions about whether the president’s powers should not be increased accordingly.

Jiří Pospíšil, photo: CTK

But the flow seems to be in the opposite direction with talk of diluting his powers to, for example, appoint the governor and board members of the Czech National Bank, judges and grant pardons. There is also talk of eroding the president’s lifetime immunity from prosecution.

For political analyst Jiří Pehe direct elections of the president need not automatically lead to greater powers.

“There are systems in Europe, for example in Austria or Slovakia where the powers of the president are comparable to those the Czech president has right now or even smaller and the president is elected directly by the people. So I think it is really a question of giving the president a different mandate rather than a stronger mandate. And also this avoids the possibility of a deadlock, something we have seen in the last two elections of the president when it took several rounds of voting before the president was elected.”

But he warns that progress by politicians so far on direct elections does not mean that a deal breaker is not on the horizon.

Václav Klaus, photo: Kristýna Maková

“In the end they will probably find it difficult to agree on something that looks like a detail but might be particularly important to some particular party. And it may have to do with keeping the president’s powers the same, of enlarging them or reducing them and this is something that the parties have no consensus on.”

In fact, Mr. Pehe warns that parties will have to get a final deal on the main planks and details of presidential elections in place by the summer so that changes can be made to choose the successor to Václav Klaus in 2013. And that, he says, is still a big task.