Czech president should be man who spent life in CzechRep - Klaus

Klaus thus indirectly, in accordance with expectations, supported Zeman ahead of the January 25-26 presidential election´s run-off vote.

"One single thing is always important for me, I said it many times before the election, long in the past, now, and I will say it tomorrow and also after the election is over. I simply want the post of president to go to a person who is a part of this country, who spent his life there, in the [country´s] hard, better, best, worst periods," Klaus said.

He said he wants "this little country to survive, to endure and not to dissipate in Europe like a lump of sugar in coffee."

Klaus would not comment on the ongoing phase of the campaign following the direct election´s first round last weekend, in which Zeman, former socialist prime minister now running for the leftist Citizens´ Rights Party (SPOZ), and Schwarzenberg, foreign minister and head of the conservative TOP 09 party, beat another seven rivals and advanced to the run-off duel.

"I wouldn´t assess neither the presidential candidates´ performance not the manipulation on the part of journalists who prevent the campaign from being fair and serious," Klaus said.

Unlike Zeman, Schwarzenberg, born to a well-known noble family in 1937, spent more than forty years in Austrian exile after his family´s emigration after the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia.

Author: ČTK
www.ctk.cz