The young man, eyes closed in reverie, smiles with delight. But then his friend reaches down without looking, misses the basket and picks up a dark clump from the grass. And as the young man devours it, leaving smears around his mouth, he soon realizes in horror that it is not chocolate he's eating. It's dog poop.

Welcome to election season in Prague 6.

The district's mayor, TomᚠChalupa, recently launched this video on the Internet in a bid to increase support for his re-election campaign in next month's regional elections. While dog waste is a major problem across the capital, the otherwise leafy streets of Prague 6 are especially bad — so much so that Chalupa may be the country's first politician to build his campaign around the issue of canine excrement.

"It was a desperate act," says Chalupa of his decision to launch the clip. "We wanted to shock people into action."

While some say the clip is over the top, so is Prague's dog-poop problem.

"We clean the streets and parks of Prague 6 twice a day," says Chalupa. "But, an hour after cleaning, the ground is filled with dog excrement just as before. And all that despite the fact that we have recently placed 400 baskets with bags expressly for disposing of dog crap throughout out the district."

The cleaning costs the district about 15 million Kč ($670,000) a year, which is much more than what is collected from the yearly 600 Kč tax on dog owners. That tax brings Prague 6 about 4 million Kč a year from a total of 7,500 registered dogs.

"Some dog owners believe they don't have to pick up after their pets because they pay the tax," Chalupa says. "That is nonsense."

According to Prague 6 spokesman Martin Šálek, there are about three times more dogs in the district than are actually registered. That means about one-third of the area's 80,000 residents own a dog.

Although a law from early 1990s fines dog owners 1,000 Kč for contaminating public space, the law has not been easy to apply. "If people see the police uniform, they are suddenly quite willing to pick up the poop, even with bare hands," Šalek says.

Michaela Robáčková, deputy director of the Prague 6 police precinct, says that, this year, 39 people have been fined for not picking up after their dogs. She also says that 1,000 Kč is the maximum fine and sometimes policemen simply scold the owner.

"But the main problem is a shortage of policemen. There are only about 25 to 30 policemen on patrol daily across 42 square kilometers [17 square miles] of Prague 6," Robáčková says.

Others, however, say dog owners are the problem. To those without dogs, Prague's pooch-lovers often seem oblivious to the fact that not everyone wants to be licked by a dog on the metro or be on the lookout for their waste.

A recent incident observed in Franciscan Garden off Wenceslas Square in New Town illustrates the divide.

The 17th-century courtyard, with its manicured grass and clean white benches, is strictly off-limits to dogs. But when its groundskeeper tried to tell a well-dressed woman that she must clean up after her poodle, which had pooped in the flowerbeds, and remove the dog from the courtyard, he received an earful.

"My darling has diarrhea!" the woman said. "What is she to do?"

It's those kinds of incidents that led Šálek, the Prague 6 spokesman, to come up with the idea for the video. "If I could think up something to solve this problem, I would win the Nobel Peace Prize," he says. "But at least the clip affects people's conscience, leaving them perhaps less likely to leave the poop on the ground if someone is watching them."

The video, however, was just the icing on the cake of Prague 6's campaign to clean up its streets. The campaign has also seen a number of billboards set up reminding pet owners to clean up after their four-legged friends, and thousands of leaflets have gone out with a similar message.

Chalupa wants to continue the effort, but says it depends on whether he is re-elected.