The Czech and Slovak Republics

Abstract

Despite the speed with which agreement was reached after the Czechoslovak parliamentary elections of 5–6 June 1992 to break up the 74-year-old ‘common state’ of Czechs and Slovaks and replace it with two independent republics, there was little evidence that the electorate in either part of the country had wished for such an outcome. With the exception of the separatist Slovak National Party, which attracted under 10 per cent of voters in Slovakia, all parties which won seats in the Federal Assembly and the parliaments in the two constituent republics claimed to favour maintaining a common state in some form. Yet the decision by the leaders of the most successful parties, Vaclav Klaus of the Czech-based Civic Democratic Party and Vaclav Meciar of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, to go for what was quickly labelled ‘a velvet divorce’, less than three years after the ‘velvet revolution’ which brought an end to communist rule, was practically unavoidable given that the elections had produced majorities in the two republican parliaments for parties with divergent and irreconcilable programmes and a Federal Assembly where the only attainable consensus was an agreement to part company.