Czechmate

After seven and a half months the Czech Republic finally has a new government. The ODS have managed to convince two social democrats to join with them, the Christian Democrats and the Greens in a coalition which is likely to be tricky to steer at best. Indeed, the two new recruits are not necessarily the most reliable people in the world, with one involved in a regional corruption scandal.

However, the country finally has a government (Czechs had joked that their country had become the biggest Non-Governmental Organisation in the world), and while the coalition doesn't seem set to be amazingly long lived, the ODS have at least now got themselves into office (which is important for credibility in the same sense that control of Downing Street was in the 1974 elections in Britain), and the polls show that if there are further elections in the near future the ODS are likely to gain, at the expense of the Social Democrats.

Like the other 'big' countries in central and eastern Europe, the Czechs are now putting off joining the euro until some indefinite point in the future. With even the Governor of the Czech central bank popping up in the FT the other week to denounce the rules of the euro (and more significantly, the inflexibility of the EU more generally), it feels like a consensus against joining is being formed.