Local, Senate elections are not definite, Klaus says

Prague, Oct 18 (CTK) - The results of the weekend local and Senate elections are not decisive, though everyone pretends to have won them, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said yesterday, according to the server Novinky.cz.

Klaus said the combination of the local elections in small and big towns with the Senate elections means that the results cannot be evaluated in any simple way.

"The results of the elections are certainly not unequivocal," Klaus told the paper Pravo.

"Thanks to them, almost all those who contested them can claim that they won it," Klaus said.

The Social Democrats (CSSD) were the most successful party in the first round of the Senate polls in which 27 seats of the 81-member upper house were contested. Twenty-two CSSD candidates advanced to the second round. The Civic Democratic Party (ODS) has 19 candidates and TOP 09 five candidates to advance.

Representatives of all the above parties have called the outcome their success.

The second round of the Senate elections will be held on October 22-23.

In the local elections, the ODS received the biggest number of votes, but it has lost a number of its strongholds, most painfully the Prague City Hall.

The most successful in the local elections were independent candidates and their groupings.

Klaus said before the elections he preferred mainstream parties.

He said "a chance to rule a town or its parts should be given to serious people. These should not be any hastily prepared rookies over whom some prominent national politician is bowing on a billboard."

Klaus may have had in mind the party TOP 09, headed by Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

The conservative TOP 09, established in 2009, has won over much of the electorate of the ODS Klaus founded in 1991.