(12 Jan 2022) The Czech lower house Parliament is to hold a mandatory confidence vote Wednesday to approve recently elected Prime Minister Petr Fiala.
Fiala is widely expected to win the vote.
"We're not populists," conservative Prime Minister Petr Fiala told lawmakers in Parliament on Wednesday.
"We're not promising anything that we're not sure we can fullfil," he said.
The coronavirus pandemic and soaring inflation present immediate policy challenges for his Cabinet, formed after two political coalitions together collected a majority of parliament seats in the country's Oct. 8-9 election and signed a power-sharing deal to rule together.
The new partnership holds 108 seats in the 200-seat lower house, relegating former Prime Minister Andrej Babis and his centrist ANO (YES) movement to the opposition. ANO narrowly lost the election with 27.1% of the vote.
A three-party, liberal-conservative coalition known as Together, composed of the Civic Democratic Party, the Christian Democrats and the TOP 09 party, came in first with 27.8% of the vote.
Together has formed a government with a center-left liberal coalition made up of the Pirate Party and STAN — a group of mayors and independent candidates — which placed third.
Despite their differences on many issues, including climate change, same-sex marriage and the adoption of the euro, the coalition parties all support the Czech Republic's memberships in the European Union and NATO.
Fiala's government has recently focused on adopting measures to address an anticipated surge of the coronavirus' highly contagious omicron variant that has become the dominant in the country.
Among them, it cut isolation restrictions for those testing positive for COVID-19 from 14 to five days, and also similarly shortened quarantine time for close contacts of infected people.
The Cabinet has made it mandatory for all employees, including those who received a booster shot, to get tested for the coronavirus twice a week and is considering allowing people in some professions who are infected with COVID-19 and have no symptoms to work.
New infections in the Czech Republic had been declining since a record high in late November, but started growing again last week.
The new government also pledged to work to phase out coal in energy production by 2033 while increasing the country's reliance on nuclear and renewable sources.
It is finalizing a plan to build another nuclear reactor and working on plans for more. The government ruled out Chinese and Russian companies would build those projects for security reasons.
The new government has also presented a plan to help residents affected by high energy prices, one of the factors behind high inflation that reached 6.6% in November. It also plans to rework next year's budget plan with a smaller deficit than the one proposed by the previous government.
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