Babis

In other news, Poland denies any involvement in last years sabotage of Russia's Nord Stream gas pipelines; the Ukrainian PoWs that Russia sent to Hungary are causing tensions; and a new amendment means former Czech prime minister Andrej Babis must sell off his media assets.

Petr Pavel, a former chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) military committee, has become the new president of the Czech Republic on Saturday, Al Jazeera reported.

Retired NATO general Petr Pavel defeated a billionaire former prime minister in an election run-off on Saturday to become the fourth president of the Czech Republic.

Pavel, a former paratrooper, won 58.3 percent of votes while Andrej Babis scored 41.7 percent, according to final results published by the Czech Statistical Office.

A referendum will take place in Slovakia on Saturday, as citizens vote on a constitutional change that would make it possible to shorten parliament's term through a referendum or by a majority vote in the parliament. The referendum, the first in seven years, was initiated by the opposition Smer party back in 2021.

Out of power but still very much in the public eye, former prime minister Andrej Babis will be in Prague's Municipal Court on Monday for the beginning of his eagerly anticipated fraud trial.

The president is still to appoint the other 17 ministerial nominees. That's meant to be a formality, but Zeman is a master of turning such formalities into political drama.

The president has told the country that he plans to object to one ministerial nomination. While he didn't name anybody, the proposal of Jan Lipavsky as foreign minister is widely assumed to be the target.

Ivan Bartos (l), leader of the Pirate Party, stands next to Vít Rakušan (R), leader of the Mayors and Independents party. Photo: Pirate Party Polarised

Polls published through September suggest that the twin coalitions are close to securing a combined 43.5 per cent of the vote, which could be just enough to win 101 of the 200 seats in parliament's lower house.

The local press was full of complaints over the tightly controlled event, which Orban stressed had definitely no connection to the upcoming election in Czechia but was merely a standard state visit. Naturally, then, the two premiers refused to take questions, but treated the few journalists admitted to an hour-long chat.

Central European leaders signed a joint declaration on Thursday saying immigration should not be the answer to the European Union's declining birth rate, while calling on the bloc to keep family policy under national jurisdiction, Reuters reports.

Czech PM Andrej Babis; Slovenian PM Janez Jansa; Hungarian PM Viktor Orban; Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic; Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik; and Hungarian Families Minister Katalin Novak on the stage at the 4th Budapest Demographic Summit in Budapest, Hungary, 23 September 2021. EPA-EFE/SZILARD KOSZTICSAK