If Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek looked calm immediately after his government lost a no confidence vote, it was probably just a facade. Because Wednesday showed that the Czech PM is losing control again.
When delivering a speech to the European Parliament, he first said that the economic stimulus package of US President Barack Obama is “a road to hell”. And when asked about the future of the Czech ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, he told MEPs to go to the opposition leader Jiří Paroubek and ask him.
Topolánek apparently happened to forget that the word “hell” sounds different in Washington and in his home town of Ostrava. Otherwise he would perhaps have chosen a different word on Wednesday. Ahead of the G-20 summit, Europe and the USA are trying to come closer together in their stances on how to tackle the crisis. But telling the Americans that they are going to hell means writing these efforts off.
What Topolánek was trying to achieve is a big mystery. In any case, he did not achieve anything as the spokesman for the EU, as suggested by the flood of debates on leading western news sites.
The same goes for his other incident – the Lisbon Treaty ratification. Topolánek puts the responsibility on Paroubek, but it’s still true that it’s Topolánek’s ODS that has been blocking the ratification, not Paroubek’s ČSSD. So not only is he bringing Czech political chaos to the rest of Europe, but he also admits indirectly that he is simply unable to manage his party. And that’s a definite handicap for someone leading the EU, which has half a billion people.
