After the February drop in the public’s confidence in the government the level of its trustworthiness has grown again – in March Špidla’s Cabinet was trusted by 47 % and not trusted by 49 % of the respondents. Similar growth has been recorded also in the case of the Chamber of Deputies, which enjoyed confidence of 40 % and was distrusted by 54 % of the interviewees. The Senate is regarded as trustworthy by 27 % of the respondents, which matches its evaluations in 2001 and 2002.

All respondents having the right to vote were traditionally asked an open question (i.e. without a list of political parties being used) investigating which party they would vote for if an election to the Chamber of Deputies took place the following week. The structure of the answers given is summarised in the table.

The question ‘Imagine that an election to the Chamber of Deputies is held next week.

In as assessment of the current state of some affairs and developments in our country, the environment became most positively evaluated area, receiving 36% of favourable opinions, 14% of unfavourable opinions; while roughly a half of respondents were unable to decide. In all other instances, the number of dissatisfied usually outweighed the number of satisfied by a large margin. The respondents were highly critical of the health sector (35%) and the functioning of authorities (33%).

None of the candidates, who in the beginning of February 2003 stood for the presidency, enjoyed strong public support. The number of supporters of any of the pretenders has not substantially surpassed the level of one third and in all cases these were outnumbered by their adversaries. Roughly the same level of preferences – a third of citizens – was achieved by candidates Petr Pithart, Otakar Motejl and Václav Klaus.

As far as the situation relating to Iraq is concerned, the basic monitored question is the agreement or disagreement with the discussed military intervention. At the beginning of February 2003, a military action was supported by a total of 22% of the Czech population, which is a little less than the figure in the preceding month. Since the start of US efforts to continue the fight against terrorism in this way, this recorded level of agreement has been at its lowest as of yet.

In its February survey, among other things, Public Opinion Research Centre focused on some aspects of relations between Czechs and Slovaks. The first question was to establish how often Czech citizens visited the Slovak Republic. The following questions concentrated on issues of how many people had relatives or friends in Slovakia and to which degree knowledge of the Slovak language was wide-spread. The respondents’ answers show that a third of Czech citizens visit the Slovak Republic less often than they did before the disintegration of the common state.

If now people in the Czech Republic had a chance to choose any country, in which they would like to live, the majority would select the Czech Republic. The prevailing mother tongue in the territory of the Czech Republic is Czech language; other languages mentioned in the survey did not exceed the level of a statistical error. Apart from Czech, which is used for communicating in the household by almost everybody, German, English and Slovak are most frequently used as a common language.

Coexistence of Romanies and the rest of the population is perceived by a large part of the public as being problematic. While in general, relations between people at the place, where they live, were described as bad only by 16.4 % of respondents, in the case of coexistence of Romanies and other citizens in their neighbourhoods critical opinions were voiced by a half (50.5 %) of respondents of those that before had said that in the vicinity of the place, where they lived, there were some Romanies living.

From the nationalities living in this country, we have the best relations with citizens of the Czech nationality and Slovaks. Czechs also find likeable Poles and Germans. On the other hand, we think that citizens from the former USSR and Balkan states are least likeable, and our worst relation is with Romanies. When evaluating our relations with nationalities in general, first place was occupied by Czechs and Slovaks, after them French, Swedes, English and Poles.

The respondents are of the opinion that no major changes occurred in the country over the course of last year. Primarily, they are convinced that no significant change happened in the sphere of citizen participation in the decision-making process about public issues, and in the observance of human rights. There is also a widespread opinion that the situation in culture and education has not changed.