Prague, March 5 (CTK) – Forty-four percent of Czechs believe that a cabinet without parliament’s confidence should not govern for more than three months, while some 25 percent admit a six-month deadline and 20 percent would not mind such governance exceeding one year, if needed, a Kantar TNS poll has shown.
The topic concerns the current Czech government, which is the ANO movement’s single-party minority cabinet that lost a vote of confidence in mid-January and continues ruling pending the establishment of a new government.
Over 70 percent of the respondents said before appointing a new PM-designate, President Milos Zeman should require that the candidate secure parliament’s support for his cabinet beforehand and submit the signatures of at least 101 out of the total 200 MPs to him, according to the poll Kantar TNS conducted for Czech Television.
Thirty-four percent of those polled answered this question “definitely yes”, while 39 percent said “probably yes.”
“Even two thirds of ANO voters say yes, though their conviction in this respect is weaker and they tend to respond ‘probably yes’,” Kantar TNS’s analyst Pavel Ranocha said.
In spite of this, 56 percent of those polled said they believe it was correct of Zeman to entrust also the second government-forming attempt to ANO leader Andrej Babis, though he has not secured a majority support in parliament for the time being.
“This view is mainly espoused by elderly people, those with lower education and naturally the voters of ANO and also of the Communists (KSCM) and the Freedom and Democracy (SPD) movement.
Asked what future government coalition they would prefer, the respondents most often mentioned that of ANO and the Social Democrats (CSSD) and of ANO and the Civic Democrats (ODS), but these variants were supported by only 5 and 4 percent of them, respectively.
The most frequent reaction to this question was “I don’t know,” which 40 percent of the respondents said.
