Related articles

The TOP 09 party has applied for membership in the European People’s Party (EPP), the largest political grouping of the European Union, the daily E15 wrote on Friday. According to the paper, the party will likely be accepted as EPP members - that is, right-wing conservative, liberal-conservative and Christian Democrat parties from all EU countries - issued a positive stand on TOP 09’s application. TOP 09 said the EPP was their sole choice and would not have considered any other European party. The party currently has observer status in the EPP, and its representatives can take part in important meetings at the European level.

Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg clashed on Thursday over the Prime Minister’s moves to coordinate European policy away from the foreign ministry and within the central government office. The Foreign Minister said he still opposed the creation of such an office headed by a EU state secretary. He said there was no sensible reason for handing over powers from the foreign ministry. Prime Minister Petr Nečas insisted talks with the foreign minister should continue and said he still needed some central coordination unit for dealing with Brussels. The coalition government abolished the European affairs ministry but the prime minister said in June that he wanted a state secretary to oversee European policy. Some EU missions have taken to consulting with the government office over Czech EU in the absence of clear guidelines who to turn to.

Czech politicians have welcomed suggestions from the European Commission about how to shake up its farm subsidy policy, the Common Agricultural Policy. A main plank of the proposed changes released on Thursday is for discrimination in support between old member states and new ones, such as the Czech Republic, to be abolished after 2013. The proposal includes a guarantee that farmers in all states would be paid a proportion of average EU farm support. At the moment Czech farmers say they get around a third less in support than farmers in richer west European countries. The Commission proposal also suggests there should be no transition period to the new subsidy framework. One worry for Czech farmers is the possibility that a ceiling could be put on payments to large farms. Czech farm holdings are six times larger than the EU average.

The Czech Republic’s ice hockey team lost their opening game of the season on Thursday, when they were beaten 4:3 by Sweden in the Karjala Tournament in Prague. The result confirmed coach Alois Hadamczik’s anit-Midas touch when it comes to the Swedes: in a previous stint at the helm between 2005 and 2008, his charges were defeated 16 times in 19 meetings with the Scandinavians. The Karjala Tournament is the first of four competitions in the European Hockey Tour.

A Prague court ruled on Thursday that local elections in the capital last month were valid. The ruling rejected complaints from the Public Affairs, Green Party and SNK European Democrats that the previous Civic Democrat city government had divided Prague into seven electoral districts shortly before the elections, a move seen as favouring them and other big parties. The ruling removes the last formal barrier to a new coalition being formed to rule the capital. But the Greens have said in the past that they would take the matter to the country’s constitutional court.

Czech Interior Minister Radek John has criticized the European Commission and several EU countries for their stance on the visa dispute between the Czech Republic and Canada. At a meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels on Monday, Mr John said the lack of solidarity on the part of the EU was “scandalous”. Canada reintroduced visas for Czech citizens in July 2009 over increasing numbers of asylum seekers from the Czech Republic. The European Commission has repeatedly voiced support for Prague and even considered imposing visas on Canadian diplomats; on Friday, however, a report by the commission said progress on the issue had been made and no special measures were necessary.

Over 1,100 Czech Catholics left on a pilgrimage to the Vatican on Monday to express their gratitude for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the Czech Republic last year. The event’s coordinator said the pilgrims also wanted to show the Pope that Czechs were not a nation of atheists. During his recent visit to Spain, the head of the Roman Catholic Church mentioned the Czech Republic as one of the European countries where faith was threatened by secularity. The focal point of the visit will be a general audience with the Pope that is scheduled for Wednesday.

Central European heads of state have just finished two days of bilateral and collective talks in the West Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary. Discussions of the Visegrad regional grouping seem to have been pretty focused thanks in part to the fact that two of the four countries will be setting the European Union’s agenda next year.

Speaking at the summit, Slovak President Gašparovič said that Roma issues were particularly thorny for his country and the Czech Republic, which are frequent targets of criticism over their Roma communities. Mr Gašparovič said that the individual countries were unable to resolve the problems on their own in the short term, and that they should be discussed further at the level of the European Union. Mr Klaus remarked that he understood why Mr Gašparovič would want to bring Roma issues to the European level, saying that the mass exodus of Roma to France would not have happened had it not been for the Schengen Agreement on open borders.

The news website iDnes.cz reports that the Czech Republic may have to return nearly half a billion crowns received from the EU for modernising the road between Brno and Vienna. The European Union co-financed the planned R52 motorway as one of fifteen important trans-European thoroughfares intended to run outside of cities and thus requiring new construction. However, work thus far has involved repairing a nine-kilometre slip road where the R52 is meant to run. The European Commission is now investigating whether the work has entailed new construction or repair.