Whoever wins the election, the new Czech leader will be greeted with relief in Europe because it will see the end of Václav Klaus, the irascible two-term president who once compared the EU to the USSR. “Anyone who has a chance to become president is more pro-European than Klaus,” said Jiří Pehe, a Czech political scientist. The first round of the election is unlikely to produce an outright winner who takes more than half the vote, which will mean a run-off in two weeks’ time.
