Letter from Prague | All stories

The general election is fast approaching and all the political parties have already begun jostling for voters. Better economic conditions and lower taxes are being promised, and one of the promises each party seems to have is combating crime in the Czech Republic. The crime rate has been rising steeply since the early 1990s while the number of resolved cases seems to be only slightly higher. While in 1996 the police caught every fourth burglar, last year it was 26.9 percent. Burglaries seem to be losing 'popularity' - while six years ago, there were 110,000 break-ins, last year there were 'only' 63,000 burglaries.

Around one hundred kilometres to the north-west of Prague, there's a little town called Dubi. Dubi's known for two things - it's home to the Czech Republic's famous blue and white onion-pattern porcelain, known as "cibulak", and it's also famous, or rather infamous, for the E55, the "Highway of Love" - a stretch of road leading up to the German border that boasts one of the highest concentrations of prostitutes in Europe. But a few weeks ago, Dubi made the news for a completely different reason.

Klaus, Gross, Kuehnl, Klestil, Daublebsky, Sichrovski - names that are no doubt familiar to Radio Prague listeners. The first three are surnames of current Czech politicians and the rest belong respectively to the Austrian President, Austrian ambassador to the Czech Republic and the general secretary of the Austrian Freedom Party. The point I'm trying to make here is that the first three are typical German names while the rest sound distinctly Slavic...