Prague, Oct 13 (CTK) – European Parliament Vice-President Pavel Telicka (unaffiliated) told reporters on Friday that he can see no reason why he should give up his MEP’s mandate after ending cooperation with the Czech ANO movement for which he had been elected.
He said he would still like to fulfil the movement’s programme from the EP election in 2014.
He said he had no signals from the leadership of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) EP group, associating also MEPs for ANO, that he should give up the post of EP vice-president either.
Telicka, 52, said he had agreed with ANO chairman Andrej Babis in many issues originally, but that their opinions started to diverge later. He said it seemed to him that ANO was deviating from the programme for which he had been elected to the EP.
Telicka said he and Babis had different views of further European integration and the adoption of the euro in the Czech Republic as well as different stances on President Milos Zeman.
He refused to connect this matter with Babis’s charges on suspicion of an EU subsidy fraud in the Capi hnizdo (Stork Nest) case.
Telicka also said he would not like to discuss his rift with ANO in detail a week before the general election, citing the effort to improve the political culture in the Czech Republic among the reasons.
Telicka added that he did not intend to join another party and he would still pursue in ALDE the programme for which he had been elected. He refused to speculate about the possibility that another of the three MEPs elected for ANO would follow him.
Telicka gave up the position of ANO expert for foreign policy earlier this year. He told reporters in August that he had no information about ANO’s course in European policy.
