Czech PM’s spending exceeds Gross Domestic Product

Date: 17/02/05

As I think about packing my bags for next week's Bush-Putin summit in Slovakia, I am grateful to the Prague Post for an article pinning down the distinction between the Czech and Slovak languages, which has long puzzled me. Sometimes I see them claimed as a single language, sometimes as two separate ones.

In communist times, Czechoslovakia was deemed to have one language with two "standards", the Czech and the Slovak.

The Prague Post explains that only about 15% of words are completely different in the two tongues. Czechs call shoes boty, while Slovaks call them topanky. An icicle is rampouch in Czech, cencul in Slovak.

A few words sound the same but have different meanings. Horky means hot in Czech, but bitter in Slovak, useful to remember when ordering beer. Nouns share the same case-endings roughly half the time.

That leaves more than enough shared vocabulary and grammar for the two languages to be mutually intelligible most of the time. But they have started to drift further apart, mainly because the Czech and Slovak media have gone their separate ways since independence in 1993.

Nowadays, Czechs hear almost no Slovak on television or radio. They are losing touch. In a few decades, says the Prague Post, Czechs and Slovaks may have to talk to each other in English, just like everyone else.

To which I would add that the Czechs and the Slovaks are diverging in other ways too - notably in their choice of governments. The Slovaks have a radical right-wing government, the boldest and possibly the best in central Europe, which has slashed taxes and boosted investment. The Czechs have a great pudding of a centre-left coalition that wobbles all over the place without actually getting anywhere.

But even Czech voters' patience is being tested by the farce which has overtaken their government in recent weeks. At the centre of it stands, if that is not too strong a word, the youthful new Prime Minister, Stanislav Gross, who took office in August.

His position has been looking increasingly difficult since a Czech paper, Mlada fronta Dnes, claimed last month that when Gross bought a new flat in 1999, he did so with a down-payment exceeding the accumulated sum of all his official earnings. Where, asked the paper, did the extra money come from?

Gross disputed the paper's arithmetic, talked about suing and said he had borrowed part of the money from an uncle called Frantisek Vik.

This sounded homely enough. But when Vik was asked, he acknowledged that he was not a rich man either and said that he had borrowed the money from relatives abroad.

At this point a Czech journalist called Rostislav Rod, though neither a relative nor abroad, intervened to claim that he was the source of the money and had a receipt from Vik to prove it.

The receipt was not long for this world. Last week Rod said he had given it to a fringe politician called Michal Simkanic. Whereupon Simkanic said that he had burned it for a publicity stunt.

Who is fooling who? The sums involved are not large. The supposed IOU was for about €30,000. But the silliness of the story has been cringe-making. If events have contrived to portray Gross in a bad light, then he should have organised events better.

Opinion polls this week showed that most Czechs wanted Gross to resign. Ideally, a snap election would follow, but the constitution makes that difficult. Alternatively, or so it seems to me, the best solution would be to put Czechoslovakia back together again while the common language still functions - and run it, for now, from Bratislava.

• Robert Cottrell is central Europe correspondent for The Economist

Article reports on linguistic relations between the Czech and Slovak Republics 12 years after the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia and on an alleged financial scandal involving the Czech Prime Minister, Stanislav Gross.