If you're Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek and your party is the Social Democrats (ČSSD), you hit the road. Often — and at a cost of millions of crowns.

That's at least how some analysts view the massive amount of foreign travel Paroubek has done in the 10 months since he stepped up to succeed Stanislav Gross, who resigned last year amid accusations of shady financial dealings.

"Paroubek's frequent trips abroad are a part of the building of a ČSSD party image, which otherwise is very low," says Alena Hromádková, a lecturer in political science at Charles University. "The ČSSD has never come to terms with the Gross scandal. The ruling elite inside the European Union knows this, and Paroubek is trying to camouflage the problem."

Since taking office on April 25, 2005, Paroubek has made 27 trips to 24 countries, considerably more than his predecessors Gross and Vladimír Špidla made during a similar amount of time.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of Paroubek's travel has been within Europe. But sprinkled among these are more ambitious tours: to Russia last May, China and Japan last June, the United States last September and India earlier this year. He returned Feb. 14 from a trip to Tunisia and Morocco. And his tally would be higher had he not canceled trips to Korea and Israel in late December.

"I've been talking about this for a month now, and people laughed at me for mentioning it," says Zdeněk Zbořil, a political analyst. "But it's true, the prime minister's travel schedule is so packed up, the number of trips is extremely extensive."

Heads of state travel. It's part of their job description. But Paroubek has never been fully seen as one, at least one with an elected mandate to represent Czech interests abroad. When Paroubek took the helm he was widely viewed as a transitional figure who lacked political experience, a placeholder who would allow the ruling ČSSD to ride out their term to this summer's election.

Of course, Paroubek takes issue with this. The goal of his trips, he tells The Prague Post, is to promote the Czech Republic as an important member of the EU — in fact, at one point in 2005, Paroubek threatened to ground President Václav Klaus for being too vocal about his anti-EU views on travels abroad.

"The significance of my trips abroad is therefore obvious," says Paroubek. "It is an active foreign policy in the Czech national interests."

The surprise for some is not that Paroubek is traveling, but that he is traveling so much. Consider Bill Clinton, one of the most peripatetic U.S. presidents in recent history. During eight years in office he made 53 foreign trips.

Paroubek even has the edge on Klaus, often thought to be the face of the nation abroad. Klaus averages about a dozen foreign trips a year.

Paroubek travels at taxpayers' expense aboard official government planes — there is no equivalent to Air Force One in the Czech Republic. The costs of these trips are spread over the budgets of both his office and the Foreign Affairs Ministry, which helps organize them.

Some call the prime minister's ramblings evidence of a subtle shift in the country's foreign policy, rather than mere publicity stunts.

"One really gets the impression that the prime minister is the man behind the foreign policy concept," instead of Foreign Affairs Minister Cyril Svoboda, the man whose job ostensibly is to travel, says Zbořil. Svoboda made 43 foreign trips in 2005.

Visiting Czech troops in Kosovo last November, Paroubek publicly supported dividing the enclave in two between ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians, breaking from the Czech government's official position.

In China last June, Paroubek downplayed human rights — a shift in policy — and talked up trade. He appears to have been rewarded when his Chinese counterpart visited Prague in December and signed a host of trade agreements with the Czech Republic.

Paroubek shows no signs of slowing down: Next month he is traveling to Argentina and Brazil. But the prime minister likes his trips short. Even jaunts far afield last little more than two days.

The brevity of his trips, and the fact that the media largely ignore them, lead some to say Paroubek's travels are essentially self-serving and unproductive.