TWO days of voting begin in the Czech Republic's general election today with voters poised to give their outgoing centre right government a second term. If they do they will break decisively with a recent trend which has seen non communist reforming governments thrown out in Poland, Hungary and other new democracies. They will also confirm their country as the most stable and conservative in the region.
The election, the first since the split with Slovakia, is a referendum on the economic reforms introduced by the Prime Minister, Mr Vaclav Klaus, who should get four more years at the helm of a broadly similar administration.
His Civic Democratic Party (ODS) has about 28 per cent support and his two coalition allies, the Christian Democrats and the smaller Civic Democratic Alliance, have 10 per cent and 7 per cent. This should be enough to give them a majority in the 200 seat parliament.
A low key campaign more notable for its musical offerings each of the 19 parties running serenaded voters with jazz and rock hands - than for the robustness of its debate has avoided controversial issues such as the souring of relations between Prague and Bonn over whether Czechs should apologise for the expulsion of 2.5 million Sudeten Germans after the second World War.
Instead, the focus was on economic issues. Unlike Polish and Hungarian voters, who threw out non communist reforming governments and handed power to former communists, the majority of Czechs are happy with the reforms introduced by Mr Klaus. Nor do they have a strong former communist party to vote for with the moderate Social Democrats (CSSD) offering the main opposition to Mr Klaus's right wing policies with about 20 per cent of the vote, according to opinion polls.
Sceptics argue the prime minister is as much a social democrat as an economic conservative. His policies since taking office in 1992 have been tailored to avoid social disruption, with the all embracing mass privatisation programme effectively a simple change of ownership from state to citizen as the centrepiece.
Now the ODS and its allies are reaping the benefits of the consensus created by their studied approach to reform. The health system is in crisis and wages for industrial workers and large groups of state employed professionals are poor, but enough people have done well from reforms to ensure the government gets the support it needs.
The CSSD, under Mr Milos Zeman, has been struggling to get across its own message, handicapped by the fact that in a country which favours consensus it is difficult to oppose things that have gone mostly right. Nevertheless, the CSSD will emerge as a more credible opposition in the new parliament.