PRAGUE: Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka will delay handing over his resignation until later this month after President Milos Zeman returns from a visit to China, government officials said Thursday.
Sobotka was scheduled to tender his resignation to Zeman on Thursday afternoon.
The leftist Sobotka said Tuesday he was standing down amid a high stakes row with his billionaire Finance Minister Andrej Babis, a popular centrist rival tipped to win elections later this year.
Government spokesman Martin Ayrer said in a statement that Sobotka would meet with Zeman later Thursday to “fix a date” to submit his resignation.
The move was likely to come after Zeman returns from a May 11-18 visit to China, said Interior Minister Milan Chovanec, a member of Sobotka’s CSSD Social Democratic party, due to travel to Beijing with the head of state.
“The prime minister will present the president with an analysis summing up the serious doubts and questions that have been left unanswered about the taxes and business dealings of Finance Minister Andrej Babis,” Ayrer added.
The head of the centrist ANO party and the second wealthiest Czech national, Babis has found himself under fire over his purchase of tax-free bonds issued by his mammoth Agrofert farming conglomerate.
Sobotka has cast doubt on the way Babis had raised money to buy the bonds and insisted that a finance minister fighting tax evasion should not benefit from tax loopholes. Babis has flatly denied any wrong-doing.
Babis is also the Czech Republic’s most popular politician with a 56 percent approval rating, according to an April CVVM poll, compared to 39 percent for Sobotka in sixth place.
The Czech political scene has been gripped by debate for weeks over the fate of the three-party governing coalition comprising Sobotka’s leftwing CSSD party, Babis’s ANO and the small centrist Christian Democrats, which took office in 2014.
The next scheduled general election is set for October 20-21, three months ahead of a presidential poll.
Analysts in Prague said a snap election was unlikely to be called during the summer.
Experts suggest that President Zeman could allow the outgoing cabinet to govern in a caretaker capacity until the October election — an option preferred by ANO and Christian Democrats leaders.
Czech PM delays tendering resignation until mid-May
Czech PM delays tendering resignation until mid-May
UK interior minister insists asylum reforms ‘fair’ amid blowback
- Mahmood argued in a speech that she was “restoring order and control” to Britain’s borders
- Amnesty International called the latest measure a “punitive blow”
LONDON: Britain’s interior minister doubled down Thursday on her tough stance on immigration despite criticism from charities and unease within the ruling Labour party that it is shedding left-wing voters.
Shabana Mahmood announced that asylum seekers who break the law or work illegally will be thrown out of government-funded accommodation and lose their support payments.
The policy forms part of a major overhaul of migration rules announced late last year and modelled on Denmark’s strict asylum system that aims to slash irregular migration to the UK.
Mahmood argued in a speech that she was “restoring order and control” to Britain’s borders and that her overhaul of the asylum was “firm but fair,” adding she would open new and safe legal routes.
But Amnesty International called the latest measure a “punitive blow” that “risks forcing people into destitution, homelessness and exploitation while they wait for their claims to be decided.”
Mahmood’s reforms are widely seen as an attempt to stem support for the hard-right Reform UK party, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage.
It has topped opinion polls for a year, in part because of the government’s failure to stop thousands of migrants from arriving in England from northern France on small boats.
But her stance has also been credited with contributing to Labour losing support to the progressive Green party, which won a local election in a traditional Labour heartland last week.
Mahmood said there was a middle path between Farage’s “nightmare pulling up the drawbridge and shutting out the world” and Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s “fairy tale of open borders.”
Her reform that makes refugee status temporary, including for accompanied children, came into force this week.
The status will be reviewed every 30 months, with refugees forced to return to their home countries once those are deemed safe.
They will also need to wait for 20 years, instead of the current five, before they can apply for permanent residency.
She also announced earlier this week that the government would stop issuing education visas to nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan.
It said there had been a surge in asylum applications by students from those countries and almost 135,000 asylum seekers in total had entered the UK using legal routes since 2021.
