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There were a lot of long faces in Czech politics as the results of elections to the European Parliament came in, and one of them was that of President Václav Klaus, the country’s most vocal eurosceptic and a fierce opponent of the Lisbon treaty. His chief ally in Europe, Ireland’s Declan Ganley, was forced to admit defeat and the three small eurosceptic parties which the Czech president indirectly supported on home ground all failed to make their mark.

The head of the Green Party, Martin Bursík, has resigned from his post over the party’s poor showing in the European elections. The Greens received just over two percent of the vote, a much lower score than they had hoped for. With the second in line now in charge, the party will try for a comeback in October’s early general election.

The Oxford-Weidenfeld prize is one of the UK’s most prestigious translation awards. This year, six books are being judged by a panel of Oxford academics and translators – amongst them Marek Tomin’s translation of Emil Hakl’s ‘O rodičích a dětech’, titled ‘Of Kids & Parents’. This Tuesday, Marek flies to Britain ahead of tomorrow evening’s ceremony. Just before he left though, I caught up with him to ask what had attracted him to the Czech original of Hakl’s book. As well as the writing style, Marek suggests, there are more personal reasons for

Sunday evening saw the opening of the Czech Republic’s main annual literary event, the Prague Writers’ Festival, at the city’s Laterna Magika theatre. Now in its 19th year, the festival continues its mission of bringing the crème de la crème of the literary world to Prague, and Czech writers to the world’s attention as well.

What will the results of this weekend’s European elections actually mean for the parties in the Czech Parliament? And could we have seen them coming? To find out I spoke to Vladimíra Dvořáková, a political analyst at the Prague School of Economics, and started by asking her whether Sunday’s results came as something of a surprise:

The centre-right Civic Democrats headed by former prime minister Mirek Topolánek were the clear winners in the Czech Republic’s elections to the European Parliament at the weekend. They finished some way ahead of the Social Democrats, taking nine out of the Czech Republic’s 22 seats.

Sunday night is election night in the Czech Republic – at least that’s when the results of Friday and Saturday’s elections to the European Parliament will be revealed. But Sunday will also see another important vote here – a vote of confidence in the caretaker government of Jan Fischer. Parliament doesn’t usually meet at weekends – so why now?

One of the parties that will be vying for votes in early elections this autumn will be a piracy-advocacy group. That’s not piracy on the high seas mind you, but the act of file sharing of copyrighted materials over the internet. The practice has infuriated copyright holders, who claim it is stifling their sales, and file sharers themselves were outraged recently when a Swedish court handed down a prison sentence to the operators of a well known file sharing server. Now proponents of file sharing are turning their soapbox issue into a political

Leaders from around the continent gathered in Krakow on Thursday to mark 20 years since Poland’s first partly free elections which swept the anti-communist movement Solidarnosc to power. In a speech to the crowds at Wawel Castle, former Czech dissident turned president Václav Havel said the elections paved the way for the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile back in Prague, the Polish Institute kicked off a series of events to commemorate the landmark vote, and all that ensued. Maciej Ruczaj from the institute told me about some of the

Europeans started voting Thursday in elections to the European Parliament with citizens in Britain and the Netherlands leading the way in the 27-country poll. Czechs will vote over the weekend with one of the main questions how far the country’s turbulent campaign will have helped mobilise voters.