Prague, April 26 (CTK) – The negotiations about a possible government of the Social Democrats (CSSD) and the ANO movement led by the party leaders, Jan Hamacek and Andrej Babis, will continue next week, Hamacek told CTK after meeting Babis late on Thursday.
He did not comment on the results of the talks he had with Babis on Thursday.
Hamacek said the Communist (KSCM) chairman Vojtech Filip would join the negotiations, same as tonight.
He said he had bilateral talks with Babis and then they talked with Filip also being present.
The three parties preliminarily agreed that the KSCM would tolerate a minority cabinet of ANO and the CSSD. Last October, ANO clearly won the general election and it occupies 78 of the 200 seats in the lower house of parliament. The CSSD and the KSCM have 15 seats each.
President Zeman appointed ANO’s minority cabinet in December, but the team led by Babis failed to win parliament’s support as none of the other eight parties in parliament supported in it a confidence vote held in January. Babis has been negotiating about the formation of his possible second cabinet since then. The right-wing opposition criticises him for leaving the country without a stable government for a long time and for making decisions as if he had a full-fledged cabinet.
Hamacek said he would report on the development of the talks at a meeting of the CSSD central executive committee on Saturday.
ANO deputy chairman Jaroslav Faltynek said the ANO committee would discuss the results of the negotiations with the CSSD on Tuesday, May 1.
On April 15, ANO and CSSD deputy heads talked about the possible coalition agreement and government policy statement.
Babis’s current cabinet has 15 members. ANO has offered to the CSSD the interior, labour, agriculture, culture and foreign ministries and it would like to apply the coalition agreement of the government of the CSSD, ANO and the Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) that ruled in 2014-17.
The CSSD wants the prime minister and the rest of the cabinet to be obliged to resign if all the five CSSD ministers left their posts. It also wants the SPD politicians to be removed from senior parliamentary posts.
ANO rejected CSSD demand that a politician who is sentenced by a court should leave the government even if the verdict is not final. This demand primarily concerns Babis who has been prosecuted over a suspected EU subsidy fraud.
The Social Democrats left the negotiating table already once, saying that ANO refuses to accept its conditions.
Babis then planned to negotiate about government cooperation with the Communists and the right-wing populist Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), but the ANO broad leadership opposed such an option, protesting against an alliance with the SPD which some of its members consider extremist.
