If and how long Topolánek rules depends on rival Jiří Paroubek. The postelection situation and his reputation as "a man without face" call for skepticism. However, he has won over skeptics. He won four elections with the ODS and increased the party's coalition potential.

Topolánek is a different kind of a politician than Paroubek. No superstar. Can he be a good prime minister? Yes, if he creates a team on which he uses his talent for coordinating.

What's unknown is his situation with wife Pavla Topolánková, who is running against the ODS for the Senate. How will Topolánek handle the country and a minority government if he has an opposition member at home? Our society is tolerant of these things. It could please confident female voters.

There are lots of things Topolánek will have to deal with: increased public debts, pension reform and the health sector, unemployment ... The ODS program was so ambitious that every compromise a minority government must make will be regarded as a failure.

He hasn't made any fundamental mistake for two months, apart from one: He hasn't yet convinced us that he is doing great. But here we are again back at his dim reputation of "a man without face."

The two inmates who escaped from Prague's Bohnice psychiatric clinic were caught soon afterward — which is reason for relief. But there is still the fact that they found it incredibly easy to escape in the first place, Pavel Verner writes in Právo Aug. 18.

If prisoners escaped from Alcatraz, why not Bohnice? It's easier, and the escapes of local patients have in fact became a sort of a local folklore. The two men were there for treatment under court order. Another culprit, this one under treatment in the intensive care section of Prague's Motol hospital, escaped by jumping out of a window. I have seen a number of patients in intensive care, but never one who'd be in shape to jump out of a window.

Criminals flee Czech clinics because we lack what is considered standard elsewhere: detention institutions combining prison service and psychiatric clinic care. The new Criminal Code draft contains provisions for two such institutions to be opened in 2007. But, before that happens, the state has a decision to make. Which is more important? A mentally ill person's right to treatment, or protecting society from such a person? The recent escape from Bohnice proves that treatment is top priority in this country. Once the court says so, Bohnice administrators can only look skyward and live on prayers. Everybody knows that, under such weak detention, a criminal can easily escape and commit another crime (one of the escapees was sentenced for murder, the other for a rape attempt), but everybody at the same time insists on these people's right to treatment.

The two culprits were still drugged and maybe that helped prevent them from committing further crimes. Still, Verner writes, a citizen has to ask: If the entire treatment is about taking pills, why couldn't they get pills in a prison hospital?