In presidential elections held in the Czech Republic over the weekend, Miloš Zeman, the former Social Democrat’s Prime Minister, defeated his second-round rival, Karel Schwarzenberg, by 55 percent to 45 percent. The outgoing head of state, Václav Klaus, has welcomed the result from this second round of voting.
The campaign grew bitter toward the end, dividing opinion not just in the Czech Republic, but abroad as as well, as Zeman made little pretense about exploiting nationalist feelings surrounding the country’s historic relationship with Germany to his own advantage.
In reaction, the influential German newspaper Die Welt recommended that Zeman not be invited to Berlin, claiming that the new Czech president defeated Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg by using “anti-German resentment” and by “raising the ghosts of the Sudetenland Germans.”
Other German media note that this changing of the guard at the Prague Castle should result in a more pro-European figurehead in Prague than outgoing president Václav Klaus.
