President in intensive care after Czech election
THE Czech elections faced uncertainty after the president was admitted to intensive care yesterday.
The results of the poll, held on Friday and Saturday, gave Spolu, an opposition bloc, a thin lead of 0.6 per cent over the incumbent ANO party, led by Andrej Babis, the prime minister.
Under the constitution, the president decides who to ask to form a government following an election, but with Milos Zeman, 77, in hospital it is unclear if he will be able to make that decision.
Mr Zeman, who has been ill recently, was taken to a military hospital in Prague minutes after meeting Mr Babis. A hospital doctor said he was “suffering from complications to a chronic condition”, but did not elaborate.
Video footage taken as the president was loaded into an ambulance appeared to show he was unconscious.
The constitution stipulates that in the event of the president being incapacitated the president of the lower house of parliament assumes responsibility.
This could give Radek Vondracek, the current president and a member of the ANO, the right to ask Mr Babis, his party boss, to form a government.
Despite trailing Spolu, ANO is still the biggest single party in parliament, according to the result, and before his collapse Mr Zeman said he would ask Mr Babis, 67, to try and form a government because of this fact.
But Spolu has struck a co-operation agreement with another opposition group meaning that it can command a majority in parliament, and therefore believes it has the right to form the next government.
No party with seats in parliament has said it is prepared to work with ANO, so Mr Babis, who has been in office since 2017, looks set to lose his post. Mr Babis has so far made no comment on what he discussed with the president before he was taken to hospital.
Last weekend, the Pandora Papers investigation showed Mr Babis, a food, chemicals and media mogul, had used money from his offshore firms to finance the purchase of property in southern France in 2009, including a chateau. He has denied any wrongdoing and slammed the allegations as a smear.