Presidential Office spokesperson Vojtech Seliga said yesterday that it was for the president and the prime minister to agree on President Petr Pavel’s participation in the NATO summer summit in Turkey, responding to earlier statements from Foreign Minister Petr Macinka that Pavel should not lead the delegation.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis (ANO) previously repeatedly said that Pavel will represent the Czech Republic at the summit.
The president’s chief spokesman, Vit Kolar, subsequently wrote to Novinky.cz to stress that the prime minister is the president’s partner in discussions.
“The president expects the prime minister to be responsible for the ministers in his government. For the president, the prime minister is his partner in discussions,” wrote Kolar.
Foreign Minister and Motorists’ leader Petr Macinka told a press conference yesterday that Pavel should not lead the Czech delegation at the summit, as he is acting outside the constitutional framework by not appointing MP and Motorists’ honorary chair Filip Turek as minister of the environment.
“Accreditation for the NATO summit is being handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on behalf of the Czech Republic. Without our cooperation, accreditation cannot be carried out,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Drake told CTK. Macinka made a similar statement at the press conference.
Late on Monday night, Macinka sent a series of text messages to the president via Pavel’s advisor Petr Kolar, threatening that if the president did not agree to appoint Turek to the cabinet, he would “burn bridges in a way that will go down in political science textbooks as an extreme case of cohabitation.” He added that he had the support of both Babis and the third coalition partner, SPD.
The Presidential Office published Macinka’s text messages yesterday on social media. Pavel said that he considered Macinka’s behaviour to be extremely serious and an attempt at blackmail. He said he will file a complaint with the security services and forward the messages to lawyers to assess whether they constitute the crime of blackmail. The police announced yesterday that they had received a request to investigate the content of the messages.
Macinka said he did not consider his words to be blackmail, as attempting to influence someone’s position is the essence of any negotiation in politics. He accused Pavel of acting outside the constitutional framework with his non-standard approach to appointing the government, but said that he is still not considering a constitutional competence lawsuit against the president.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis (ANO) said yesterday afternoon that Macinka’s words in the text messages were unfortunate, but that they were private communications with an advisor and therefore certainly not blackmail.
He invited Pavel and Macinka to a joint meeting, as he does not consider the current conflict to be appropriate. “The current conflict between President Petr Pavel and Foreign Minister Petr Macinka is not right,” he said. “I would like to invite both gentlemen to a joint meeting, as issues are always resolved better and faster at the table than through strong messages in the media at press conferences.”
Pavel made the announcement yesterday afternoon at a hastily convened press conference. According to Kolar, the president wanted to inform the public about the matter before leaving on a private trip abroad. In the evening, the Presidential Office website stated that Pavel had left for a European Union member state, without specifying which.
