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The weekend's elections have produced a perfect split in parliament. If you look at a map of the election results, it also shows an almost perfect split in the way Czechs voted. Throughout Moravia, the eastern part of the country, more voted in favour of the left-leaning Social Democrats, while most of Bohemia, the western part of the Czech Republic cast more votes for the centre-right Civic Democrats.

The Czechs have gone to the polls: after eight years in government, the Social Democrats are to make room for the opposition right-of-centre Civic Democrats, with their sweeping promises of pro-market reforms and tax cuts. But that is not the end of the story. The Civic Democrats will only be able to form a majority government if they join forces with the Social Democrats. They have already rejected any form of cooperation with the Communists. The leaders of the Civic Democrats and the Social Democrats so far rule out a Grand Coalition, leaving

Though the governing Social Democratic Party do appear to have come off second best in this year's elections, the party did win a greater percentage of the votes than most opinion polls suggested. So the deputy prime minister for the economy, Jiri Havel, isn't taking the result as that much of a defeat for his party.

As pre-election polls predicted, the Czech Green Party looks to have safely crossed the five percent barrier and made it into parliament for the first time since its establishment in 1990. Preliminary results show that the Greens could very well be key to establishing a coalition government. At Green Party headquarters on Saturday afternoon, Green Party leader, Martin Bursik, gave some reactions to his party's preliminary showing.

With all of the hullabaloo surrounding the opposing parties and their campaign promises, pledges and other jockeying for support from Czech voters, it's perhaps its easy to forget that free elections are a relatively young phenomenon here. Jiri Dienstbier knows this. He was a dissident under communist rule, during which time he published several underground newspapers and later spent three years in prison with his friend Vaclav Havel.

The Czech Communist party so far appears to have received a smaller percentage of votes cast than they did in the 2002 election - when they won nearly a fifth of the vote. Even so, they are still likely to come out of this year's elections as the country's third strongest party.

Live music, food, champagne. The Civic Democrats are celebrating and they say their victory is clear. They also point to the high voter turnout at 65%, as opposed to 58% in the 2002 elections, as a victory.

When polling stations in the Czech Republic opened on Friday, the country's leading political representatives did not wait long to cast their votes. President Vaclav Klaus and his wife, Livia, voted together at an elementary school in Prague 8.

Who will rule the Czech Republic over the next four years? In recent days political analysts have been speculating on the pros and cons of various coalition scenarios. On Saturday, political analyst Jiri Pehe came to Radio Prague's studio to comment on the outcome of the elections:

According to estimates, some two million people of Czech extraction live outside the Czech Republic. Some 300,000 out of those have Czech citizenship and are therefore entitled to elect deputies to the lower house of the Czech parliament. It was not always the case. Czechs living abroad had their first chance to vote in the previous election four years ago after a law had been passed to that effect. But fewer than 4,000 of them turned up to cast their ballots at the Czech Republic's embassies and consulates around the world. Expectations are similar