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Polls: Ex-caretaker PM people’s choice for president

  12:57

Surveys in the broadsheet MF Dnes and tabloid Blesk show more Czech voters keen on Fischer as head of state as Švejnar’s star fades

Former caretaker PM Jan Fischer (left) is now polling well ahead of early favorite Jan Švejnar (right), a Czech-American economist who in 2008 took on the current president, Václav Klaus, in what stand to be the last elections to be decided by parliamentarians — rather than the people foto: © Wikimedia, ReutersČeská pozice

Nearly a third of Czechs would cast their ballots in the country’s first direct presidential elections next year for Jan Fischer, the statistician with no formal party ties who served as prime minister in a caretaker government, a survey by the Median agency showed.

The poll, conducted for and published in the daily Mladá fronta Dnes on Friday — a day after the upper house of Parliament passed a Constitutional amendment allowing for direct elections — found that Fischer, currently a European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) vice president, had the support of 32% of respondents.

Coming in a distant second as the popular choice to secede Václav Klaus as head of state, with 15% support, was Czech-American economist Jan Švejnar, who competed unsuccessfully against Klaus for the presidency in 2008 in an election decided by lawmakers. Constitutional law prevents Klaus, whose second five-year term ends on March 7, 2013, from seeking a third consecutive term. Direct elections should be held next year between January 6 and February 5, according to the daily.

A little over a year ago, Švejnar had twice his current level of support in a Median poll.

A little over a year ago — long before it was certain the Czech Republic would hold direct presidential elections (the Senate only approved the measure this week) —Švejnar was the frontrunner, polling at 30.7% in a Median survey from December 2010 (though even more respondents said there were “undecided”).

Now, Švejnar is polling just a few percentage points ahead of a total newcomer to politics — though a household name due to his role as the long-time public face of a national tourism group — the Czech-Japanese businessman Tomio Okamura, who was named first choice for president by 12% of respondents.

Okamura, the former head of the Association of Tour Operators & Travel Agencies of Czech Republic (AČCKA), is said to be considering staging a run for the upper house of Parliament (the Senate) from Zlín, South Moravia, but has his eyes on the bigger prize (taking up office at Prague Castle). 

Both Švejnar and Okamura, like Fischer, are unaffiliated. In fourth and fifth place in the Median poll were, respectively, Miloš Zeman (10%), the former Social Democrat (ČSSD) prime minister who founded a new party — the eponymous center-left Citizens’ Rights Party–Zemanites (SPOZ) party — that led a petition drive for direct presidential elections, and Karel Schwarzenberg (6%), the chairman of the center-right TOP 09 party and current minister of foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, in a poll of 20,000 readers by the tabloid Blesk— the best-selling daily in the Czech Republic — Fischer did even better, with 38% of the votes, followed by Okamura with 16%, Švejnar with 14%), the Chairwoman of the lower house of Parliament, Miroslava Němcová (Civic Democrats, ODS) with 12%, and — again trailing the pack — Schwarzenberg and Zeman, with 7% each.

According to the new legislation approved by the Senate, any Czech with 50,000 signatures from supporters can join the race to be head of state (thus far, only Zeman, who passed that threshold last year, has mounted such a campaign. A possible shortcut to that would be backing from 20 members of the lower house of parliament or 10 senators from the upper house.

The presidential election will be a two-round battle if no single candidate wins more than 50 percent of all votes cast in the first round. The two highest scoring candidates from the first round would go through for a head-to-head battle in the second round with the one getting most votes declared the winner.

Jan Fischer

Prior to his appointment as interim prime minister, Jan Fischer (unaffiliated) was head of the Czech Statistical Office (ČSÚ), a position he had held for seven years. Although he had worked at the office since its foundation in 1990 — and had long attended weekly Cabinet meetings — the statistician was practically unknown to the wider public.

A member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1980 until the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, Fischer, now 61, was a compromise choice to leed the interim caretaker government from April 2009 through to June 2010, after a vote of no confidence brought down the Civic Democrats (ODS)–led government headed by Mirek Topolánek (ODS) in the middle of the Czech Republic’s turn at the helm of the EU presidency.

During his tenure as head of government, Fischer’s popularity ratings consistently ranked among the highest gained by any Czech prime minister since the downfall of the communist regime in 1989. His critics say, however, that he lacked initiative and name failure to act on the out-of-control state subsidization of photovoltaic farms as a prime example. Fischer, however, flatly rejects blame for failing to intervene to curtail the “solar boom” that cost the state dearly. 

Fischer was born in Prague. His father, a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences specializing in mathematical and statistical applications in genetics, selective growing and medicine, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor. His mother was also a statistician.

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