Polls announced for May to free parliament

Prague, Feb 5 (CTK) - (CTK reporter Jakub Dospiva) - The elections to the Czech Chamber of Deputies that President Vaclav Klaus convoked Friday for May 28-29 are to unblock Czech parliamentary politics, but they are not expected to change it markedly.

The elections will see a traditional battle of the two strongest political parties, the Civic Democrats (ODS) and the Social Democrats (CSSD).

The division of the right and the left's supporters is not much changing. However, disgust at politics has been growing over the past few years, support for the "traditional" parties is declining and so newly emerged groupings on both sides of the political spectrum have a chance to succeed.

Voter support for the two largest parties has been over 25 percent while the CSSD has been leading the ODS by a few percentage points in the long run.

The May elections result will also depend on turnout. The left that has usually more disciplined voters is benefited by a lower turnout.

Elections often end up in a stalemate, yet debates on a change to the proportional system have been fruitless to date.

Since last year, the ODS has been embarrassed about the new conservative party TOP 09 founded by the former foreign and finance ministers, Karel Schwarzenberg and Miroslav Kalousek, respectively.

The party that the ODS first perceived as a "catcher" of centre-right city liberal voters has started to live its own life and is now cutting into the "hard core" of ODS voters.

TOP 09 with 12-13 percent voter support is now catching up with the Communists (KSCM) who have had regularly a similar support.

However, the CSSD has banned itself in 1995 from cooperating with the Communists on government level.

TOP 09's analogy on the left side of the political spectrum, the Party of Citizens' Rights (SPO) funded by Milos Zeman, former prime minister and former CSSD chairman, will not probably score a similar success.

It is now supported by a few percent of people just as the new party Public Affairs that has a similar, though ideologically different manifesto.

The Christian Democrats (KDu-CSL), a traditional party in parliament, and the Green Party (SZ), that entered parliament in 2006 for the first time, will have to put up a real struggle for voters.

Both of them have been harmed by their intra-party squabbling. Some of TOP 09 members are former KDU-CSL members.

The Greens have been unable to cope with their success.

It seems that the ODS and CSSD will bet on local issues and their campaigns will differ from region to region also with regard for the autumn local elections.