Two days to Klaus

Radio Free Europe has a good report on President Vaclav Klaus who will take over as EU President in just two days time. It describes how he has recently been at loggerheads with outgoing EU President Sarkozy of France: The sparring continued, with Klaus telling Czech Television on December 24 that Sarkozy and politicians like him were actually "anti-European" for not respecting the continent's diversity of views. Another unusual line of complaint about the EU has been the car license plates as reported here: Speaking to RFE/RL last year, Klaus illustrated his point by recalling two cars he'd seen at a traffic light. One had an old Czech license plate, with "CZ" in large letters; the other, an EU plate, where the "CZ" sign was much smaller: "The EU is trying to make the letters that symbolize our state as small as possible. You can't even tell from a distance if there's an NL for the Netherlands written on there, or an SK for Slovakia. You can't tell. You either need binoculars or you need to be driving right next to the car," Klaus said. "This is a textbook example of the attempt to suppress, to rub out the basic entity that has formed the European continent and has given this continent its characteristic features," he added. Elsewhere in this morning's press is a report that Lisbon Treaty opponents will present a report on the consequences of the Constitutional Treaty in the Czech Senate in January before February's parliamentary debate on ratification.