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Parliamentary representatives from the Visegrad Four countries - Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, attended a meeting at the Štiřín chateau outside Prague on Thursday. After the meeting they again criticised the idea of compulsory refugee quotas for European Union states. According to the Hungarian parliament leader, László Kövér, it is an attempt to federalise Europe, while the head of the Czech Parliament, Milan Štěch, said it was an excess, which will hopefully not be repeated in the future.

The Czech Republic is among seven EU countries with the smallest budget deficit and state debt, according to 2015 figures released by Eurostat. The Czech Republic had a deficit amounting to 0.42 percent of the GDP and a state debt at 41.0 percent of the GDP. Luxembourg, Germany and Estonia had surplus budgets in 2015 and Sweden a balanced budget. The least indebted countries are Estonia and Luxembourg.

The migrant crisis is making Czechs increasingly wary of foreigners. According to a recent poll conducted by the STEM agency, the number of people who think an ethnic group or minority should have the right to live in the Czech Republic according to its own traditions has dropped by almost a half to 25 percent in the past two years. Only 25 percent of respondents now say requests for Czech citizenship should be granted without regard to nationality or ethnicity. And three quarters of Czechs consider foreigners to be a security threat. For this week’s

President Miloš Zeman has suggested that criticism of the European Union on his part was not to try and “break it” but on the contrary to help focus on outstanding problems; the president was reacting to a recent charge by the prime minister that he criticized the EU as often as his predecessor Václav Klaus. Mr Zeman, for example, ridiculed the planned 1,500-strong border patrol meant to prevent the entry of up two million refugees. He called it a “ragtime army” which would do nothing to help. He suggested the EU was in dire need of real personalities like Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Charles de Gaulle or Francois Mitterrand.

Interior Minister Milan Chovanec will reject mandatory refugee quotas at a meeting of European interior ministers this Thursday, Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka tweeted after the matter was discussed at the weekly government meeting. The Czech government remains opposed to mandatory refugee quotas on the grounds that such a system simply does not work, Czech Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek reiterated at the weekend. The Czech government instead supports the existing agreement on the return of refugees with Turkey and remains in favour of a stronger European border and coast patrol. At the weekend, the prime minister said that if a permanent mechanism which divided refugees among the EU countries was introduced, the Czech Republic would challenge it in court.

Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said that if the Czech Republic was forced to accept a permanent redistribution of migrants as proposed by the EC, the country may take the issue to court. In a debate on commercial TV Prima the prime minister said he hoped it would not come to that and that in cooperation with other EU members such a solution could be averted. The Czech Republic has consistently opposed mandatory migrant quotas of the grounds that the system has shown itself unworkable even on a small scale. A voluntary relocation project on the resettlement of 150 Iraqi Christians in the Czech Republic failed miserably in recent weeks after 49 of the 89 who came here either tried to move to Germany illegally or returned home. The project was cancelled.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka has said he would like the countries of the Visegrad group states to negotiate a common stand to the EC’s asylum proposals unveiled this week. Mr. Sobotka said he would propose rejecting both a permanent system of redistribution of migrants and a more centralized asylum process within EU institutions which would detract powers from national governments. The Czech prime minister discussed the matter with his Polish counterpart Beata Szydlova during Friday’s joint cabinet session in Warsaw and said she fully backed this position. He is to bring up the issue at a meeting with the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico next week. As the country currently presiding over the Visegrad group the Czech Republic will also initiate consultations with Hungary on the matter.

Amidst a deepening refugee crisis in Europe, the EC on Wednesday proposed new common asylum rules that would replace the so-called Dublin Regulation, under which people must claim asylum in the first EU state they enter. The two options proposed both envisage an automatic redistribution of migrants which the Czech Republic has consistently rejected.

A number of Czech politicians have criticised President Miloš Zeman for saying the previous government headed by Petr Nečas had succumbed to pressure from the US and the EU, preventing positive relations with China. The country is in the EU and the US is its partner within the framework of NATO, meaning the president’s views are at odds with Czech foreign policy, TOP 09’s Miroslav Kalousek told the Czech News Agency. Mr. Nečas, a former leader of the Civic Democrats, said it was his government that had begun a change towards more positive relations with China, not the current one as Mr. Zeman suggested. Communist leader Vojtěch Filip took a rather different view, asserting that the Nečas government had relied completely on orders from Washington.

The previous Czech government succumbed to pressure from the United States and the European Union but the current cabinet has managed to extricate itself from such influences, the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, said in an interview for Chinese television station CCTV quoted by the Czech News Agency on Monday. Mr. Zeman said this made the Czech Republic an independent state and allowed for a new beginning in relations between his country and China, whose president, Xi Jinping, is beginning a state visit to Prague.