Lawmakers dissolve Czech parliament in wake of Necas bribery scandal

[Rainman05]

Lawmakers dissolve Czech parliament in wake of Necas bribery scandal | News | DW.DE | 20.08.2013

Lawmakers have voted to dissolve the Czech parliament, triggering early elections. The country has been mired in political crisis since the prime minister stepped down over a bribery scandal involving his aide and lover.

A total of 140 lawmakers of the 147 present backed the proposal tabled by three major parties. It had needed a majority of 120 votes in the 200-seat parliament to succeed. The centrist Social Democrats - the primary opposition party and, according to polls, the most likely to dominate the upcoming snap elections - had called for the vote to dissolve parliament, along with the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia and the center-right TOP 09.

The right-wing government led by Petr Necas took office after the 2010 parliamentary elections, and fell in June when prosecutors charged the prime minister's lover and chief-of-staff, Jana Nagyova, with bribery and abuse of power. After Necas fell, Milos Zeman - in office since March as the country's first-ever directly elected president - named a Cabinet led by his left-wing ally Jiri Rusnok. Appointed in July, that government lost a confidence vote in parliament on August 7.

[...]early elections for October 25-26, moving them well up from the planned May 2014.

A poll by the ppm factum agency found that the Social Democrats would garner 21 percent of the vote in an early election, TOP 09 would have 10 percent and the Communists 9 percent. The right-wing Civic Democrats - formerly led by Necas and the only top party not to petition for the dissolution vote - would end up with a mere 6 percent, according to the August 12-16 poll of 1,002 respondents. Such a setup would mean the Communists would end up on the governing side of parliament for the first time since 1990, a year after the collapse of communism in the former Czechoslovakia, which split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

So this is very troubling news. The Czechs, EU member since 2004 if I am correct, are now looking at early elections and a dissolution of the government. The right wing party took power in 2010 and messed up filling the highest offices of power with corruption. Then the leftists came along and lost the confidence vote to govern even with the endorsement of the president. What's left?

I did follow the story, I don't know if I posted it, ever since the first signs of trouble started showing. Now it seems that this is the resolution.
So the Czechs will have elections in october. A new government. A new parliament.

The Czech Republic is a parliamentary republic, which means you have both a president as the head of state and a prime minister as the head of government which holds most of the power. The government is formed by the ruling party/coalition in parliament.

Now you may have seen the czech communist party of Bohemia and Mozavia. This is the successor to the original communist party which was declared a criminal organization after the iron curtain fell. They have a communist agenda it is true, but it's not a radical communist one. They don't advocate single party state for instance or advocate for collectivization of lands or nationalization of private property. But they are a communist party.