Jun 3, 2006, 23:47 GMT
Prague - A conservative opposition party that promised tax and bureaucracy cuts defeated the left-wing party of Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek Saturday in the Czech Republic election, according to State Election Commission results.
Paroubek refused to accept defeat and said that his left-wing Social Democrats (CSSD) might contest the election based on campaign tactics used by the apparent winners, the right-wing Civic Democrats (ODS).
The commission said that ODS received 35 per cent of the vote in the two-day election, topping the 32 per cent support for the incumbent CSSD.
If the results hold, Paroubek, 53, could be replaced by ODS leader Mirek Topolanek, 50, an engineer-turned-politician who started campaigning for this election in 2004. Another premier possibility for ODS was Prague Mayor Pavel Bem, 42.
'We're very satisfied with the results,' Topolanek told reporters at a victory party with Bem, whose city backed ODS over CSSD by a more than two-to-one margin.
President Vaclav Klaus, a former ODS chairman, said he would meet ODS leaders Monday to discuss plans for the next government.
At a post-election press conference, Paroubek, whose party has held power since 1998, blasted ODS for 'methods of manipulating the public that the totalitarian regime used before 1989,' the year the former communist regime was ousted in the Velvet Revolution.
Those tactics included the pre-election release of a police report charging the government with ties to organized crime, and alleging that Paroubek molested a teenaged girl. The premier called it dirty politics and filed a lawsuit.
Paroubek compared ODS to the Soviet-backed communists who seized power in 1948.
Late Saturday, Klaus said he was 'absolutely shocked' at Paroubek's comment about 1948 but acknowledged that the election campaign was 'extraordinarily confrontational.'
The apparent conservative shift among Czech voters mirrored similar changes last year in neighbouring Germany and Poland.
It also reflected public frustration with a CSSD-led government that delivered record economic growth but bogged down in political scandals, including a personal finance blunder that forced a former prime minister to resign last year.
In the last year CSSD and Paroubek were often criticized for working closely on legislation with the communist party KSCM. CSSD and its coalition partners have ruled with a left-liberal agenda of social spending since 1998, following a period of ODS control that followed the 1993 breakup of the former Czechoslovakia.
ODS campaigned with promises to fight corruption and impose a flat, 15-per-cent income tax to replace a graduated income tax and a 24-per-cent corporate rate. The party is sceptical toward the European Union, which the Czech Republic joined in 2004, and does not want to set a date for adopting the euro currency.
Turnout was an unexpectedly high at 64 per cent, topping the 58 per cent turnout in the last election four years ago, the election commission said.
Political observers had feared voters would boycott polls in reaction to fierce mud-slinging by Paroubek and Topolanek in the campaign's final weeks.
The election set the stage for a likely right-wing coalition linking ODS and the Christian Democrats (KDU), who received 7 per cent of the vote.
Topolanek said he favours an ODS-KDU linkup, though such a coalition would not reach a majority in the 200-seat lower house of parliament.
CSSD retained a significant bloc of about 74 seats, compared with an estimated 81 for ODS.
The election outcome could draw CSSD closer to KSCM, which received nearly 13 per cent of the vote. The two parties apparently won a combined 101 seats.
A possible power broker in the post-election scramble was the recently organized Green Party (SZ), which will debut in parliament after winning 6 per cent of ballots.
SZ could swing to the side of ODS or CSSD, depending on the outcome of a power struggle between the party's left- and right-wing factions.
But an ODS-KDU-SZ coalition would apparently still fall short of a majority in parliament, a situation that could lead to legislative gridlock.
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