Bohemica.com

Czechs face prolonged post-election deadlock | Reuters.com
Czech voters face weeks of political uncertainty or even fresh elections after delivering a deadlock between centre-right and leftist parties in weekend general elections.

Full preliminary results showed the opposition Civic Democrats won the biggest share of the popular vote but not a majority in the first elections since the ex-communist nation joined the European Union two years ago.

The conservative party and its two smaller centrist allies, the Greens and Christian Democrats, would hold 100 seats in the 200-member lower house -- the same as the ruling Social Democrats and far-left Communists.
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Making the situation even messier, Social Democrat Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek refused to concede defeat and threatened to appeal in court against the election result.

He said sleaze accusations levied against him in the final days of the campaign were "absurd slander", lambasting the media for siding with the opposition to undermine him.
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The Communists, whose authoritarian Soviet-backed rule ended in the 1989 "Velvet Revolution", saw their share of the vote and seats drop significantly but they will remain the third biggest force in the new parliament.

Only two more parties, the Greens and the Christian Democrats, passed the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament but they would hold only 19 seats between them.

No big surprises here. Maybe the communist propaganda of the 1950s was right and Czechs really are naturally left leaning because despite all that the Social Dems did in government they still couldn't give the absurdly and experimentally right wing Civic Dems an outright majority (although it could be because they are anything but slease free). This is the second time ODS (Civic Dems) resorted to scare tactics before elections - warning of a communist government unless they get elected. And the Premier (probably outgoing) called them on it - comparing their strategy to the 1948 communist coup (justifiable at least as to the virulence of their rhetoric). This was an interesting reversal of the recent Italian electoral stalemate - where it was the rigth-winger who refused to concede.

This is going to be fun to watch, especially since the 'honorable chairman' of the ODS is the president who gets to name the future government (another reminder of the communist days of cults of personality - the Communist Party never had another chairman after the death of Klement Gottwald - just secretaries general - although the libertarian idol Masaryk had his own cultish following as well).