Originally, Sobotka planned to leave the job to the government that was supposed to emerge after the elections, but one still hasn't been created because they effectively ended in a stalemate.

"I'll draw a few different drafts, and it will all depend on whether political consensus can be reached," Sobotka said Aug.3, adding that a draft should be presented to Jiří Paroubek's Cabinet by Aug.15.

The deficit in Sobotka's draft will not exceed 88 billion Kč ($4 billion), his office said Aug. 7. To acheive this, there will have to be significant cuts to the new social subsidies promised to voters during the pre-election campaign.

For that reason, none of the political parties has shown much interest in presenting a budget with the Senate election approaching in the fall.

Indeed, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), which came out slightly ahead in the elections but has so far been unable to piece together a coalition, is sitting out of the issue.

"I told Jiří Paroubek that we'll let him present a budget on his own," Mirek Topolánek, chairman of the ODS, recently said.

But someone is going to have to step up if the government is to continue on its path to adopting the euro in 2010. According to the European Union's euro adoption requirements, the budget gap cannot exceed 3.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) next year, which means it cannot be higher than 90 billion Kč.

For this to happen, virtually all the promised social subsidies will have to be postponed.

"If some of the promised laws are not postponed, no government will be able to get the 2007 deficit under 120 billion Kč," Eduard Janota, deputy finance minister, recently told Hospodářské noviny.

But Zdeněk Škromach, labor and social affairs minister for the ruling Social Democrats, said no cuts will be made.

Last year, the public finance deficit dropped to 2.59 percent of GDP from 2.86 percent in 2004. The Finance Ministry estimated in April that this year the gap could widen to 3.6 percent of GDP.