On Friday, the President will discuss participation in the summit in Ankara with Babis. The final decision on what the Czech Republic’s participation in the summit will look like cannot be postponed indefinitely, Pavel said. “I would like to announce it together with the prime minister tomorrow, because it is necessary to put an end to all conjecture and senseless wrangling in the media,” he added in the interview.
Should Babiš refuse Pavle’s participation, the president is preparing his own steps. “I will have to use a tool that, from my point of view, is borderline, and that is a constitutional lawsuit for systematically limiting the functioning of the president, that is, actually for systematically hindering the exercise of his constitutional powers. And I don’t think that Andrej Babiš would want to go that far,” Pavel pointed out.
During Friday’s meeting, the President primarily wants to clarify who can tell whom to “go somewhere or not,” he said. “The main topic will be to clarify that there are four constitutional officials here and that none of them is superior to the others. In other words, that the government and the Prime Minister are not in a position to say: The President or the Chairman of the Senate will go somewhere or not,” Pavel said.
According to Pavel, such a decision should be the result of negotiations between the President, the President of the Senate, the head of the Chamber of Deputies and the Prime Minister. At the same time, the Cabinet recently refused to provide Senate President Miloš Vystrčil (ODS) with a plane to travel with a business delegation to Taiwan.
According to the president, if the government did not provide a plane for Pavlo’s trip to the NATO summit, it would be “embarrassing”. However, he plans to go to Ankara in any case. “Because I can’t imagine that we should do it any other way,” emphasized the president.
He repeated that he could participate in the evening informal meeting of the heads of state at the summit, where the topic is primarily security and defense in the European and global context, while Babiš can explain Czech defense spending in the main part of the meeting. This year, according to the previous assumptions, they will be below two percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). At last year’s summit in The Hague, the member states agreed to increase the commitment from two percent to 3.5 percent of GDP spent annually on defense.
Pavel also wants to discuss the low frequency of their contacts with Babiš on Friday, he said. “I will appeal to the prime minister to return at least to coordination at the level of the two of us, but I would not at all rule out coordination at the level of the highest constitutional officials with the participation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs or Defense,” he said. The president wants to suggest to Babiš that they “call each other at least once every two weeks and meet physically once a month”.
The head of state also wants to talk to the prime minister about the current statements of the government’s Motorists, that is, the words of Foreign Minister Petr Macinka about inferior people or the statement of the government representative for the Green Deal, Filip Turk, about the extermination of parasites at the Ministry of the Environment.
